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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
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POINTS OF VIEW 



BY 



AGNES REPPLIER 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1891 






75 UH 



Copyright, 1891, 
By AGNES REPPLIER. {fit 

All rights reserved. 



^ 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge , Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Houghton & Company. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

A Plea for Humor 1 

English Love-Songs . ...... 30 

Books that have Hindered Me . . . .64 

Literary Shibboleths ...... 78 

Fiction in the Pulpit . . • 105 

Pleasure: a Heresy 136 

Esoteric Economy .166 

scanderbeg . . 189 

English Railway Fiction . . . . .209 



" Scanderbeg " is reprinted from " The Catholic World" 
by permission of the publishers. 



POINTS OF VIEW. 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 

More than half a dozen years have passed 
since Mr. Andrew Lang, startled for once out 
of his customary light-heartedness, asked him- 
self, and his readers, and the ghost of Charles 
Dickens — all three powerless to answer — 
whether the dismal seriousness of the present 
day was going to last forever ; or whether, 
when the great wave of earnestness had rippled 
over our heads, we would pluck up heart to be 
merry and, if needs be, foolish once again. 
VNot that mirth and folly are in any degree 
synonymous, as of old ; for the merry fool, 
too scarce, alas, even in the times when Jacke 
of Dover hunted for him in the highways, has 
since then grown to be rarer than a phoenix. 
He has carried his cap and bells, and jests 
and laughter, elsewhere, and has left us to the 



2 POINTS OF VIEW. 

mercies of the serious fool, who is by no 
means so seductive a companion. If the Cocque- 
eigrues are in possession of the land, and if 
they are tenants exceedingly hard to evict, 
it is because of the connivance and encourage- 
ment they receive from those to whom we in- 
nocently turn for help : from the poets, and 
novelists, and men of letters, whose plain duty 
it is to brighten and make glad our days. 

" It is obvious," sighs Mr. Birrell deject- 
edly, "that many people appear to like a 
drab-colored world, hung around with dusky 
shreds of philosophy ; " but it is more obvious 
still that, whether they like it or not, the 
drapings grow a trifle dingier every year, and 
that no one seems to have the courage to tack 
up something gay. What is much worse, 
even those bits of wanton color which have 
rested generations of weary eyes are being 
rapidly obscured by sombre and intricate 
scroll-work, warranted to oppress and fatigue. 
The great masterpieces of humor, which have 
kept men young by laughter, are being tried 
in the courts of an orthodox morality, and 
found lamentably wanting ; or else, by way of 
giving them another chance, they are being 



A PLEA FOB HUMOR. 3 

subjected to the peine forte et dure of mod- 
ern analysis, and are revealing hideous and 
melancholy meanings in the process. I have 
always believed that Hudibras owes its chilly 
treatment at the hands of critics — with the 
single and most genial exception of Sainte- 
Beuve — to the absolute impossibility of twist- 
ing it into something serious. Strive as we 
may, we cannot put a new construction on 
those vigorous old jokes, and to be simply and 
barefacedly amusing is no longer considered 
a sufficient raison d'etre. It is the most sig- 
nificant token of our ever-increasing " sense 
of moral responsibility in literature " that we 
should be always trying to graft our own con- 
scientious purposes upon those authors who, 
happily for themselves, lived and died before 
virtue, colliding desperately with cakes and 
ale, had imposed such depressing obligations. 

" Don Quixote," says Mr. Shorthouse with 
unctuous gravity, " will come in time to be 
recognized as one of the saddest books ever 
written ; " and, if the critics keep on expound- 
ing it much longer, I truly fear it will. It 
may be urged that Cervantes himself was low 
enough to think it exceedingly funny; but 



4 POINTS OF VIEW. 

then one advantage of our new and keener 
insight into literature is to prove to us how 
indifferently great authors understood their 
own masterpieces. Shakespeare, we are told, 
knew comparatively little about Hamlet, and 
he is to be congratulated on his limitations. 
Defoe would hardly recognize Eobinson Crusoe 
as "a picture of civilization," having inno- 
cently supposed it to be quite the reverse; 
and he would be as amazed as we are to learn 
from Mr. Frederic Harrison that his book 
contains " more psychology, more political 
economy, and more anthropology than are to 
be found in many elaborate treatises on these 
especial subjects," — blighting words which 
I would not even venture to quote if I thought 
that any boy would chance to read them, and 
so have one of the pleasures of his young life 
destroyed. As for Don Quixote, which its 
author persisted in regarding with such mis- 
placed levity, it has passed through many be- 
wildering vicissitudes. It has figured bravely 
as a satire on the Duke of Lerma, on Charles 
V., on Philip II., on Ignatius Loyola, — Cer- 
vantes was the most devout of Catholics, — 
and on the Inquisition, which, fortunately, did 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 5 

not think so. In fact, there is little or no- 
thing which it has not meant in its time ; and 
now, having attained that deep spiritual in- 
wardness which we have been recently told is 
lacking in poor Goldsmith, we are requested 
by Mr. Shorthouse to refrain from all brutal 
laughter, but, with a shadowy smile and a 
profound seriousness, to attune ourselves to 
the proper state of receptivity. Old-fashioned, 
coarse-minded people may perhaps ask, " But 
if we are not to laugh at Don Quixote, at 
whom are we, please, to laugh ? " — a ques- 
tion which I, for one, Would hardly dare to 
answer. Only, after reading the following 
curious sentence, extracted from a lately pub- 
lished volume of criticism, I confess to finding 
myself in a state of mental perplexity, utterly 
alien to mirth. " How much happier," its 
author sternly reminds us, " was poor Don 
Quixote in his energetic career, in his earnest 
redress of wrong, and in his ultimate triumph 
over self, than he could have been in the gnaw- 
ing reproach and spiritual stigma which a 
yielding to weakness never failingly entails ! " 
Beyond this point it would be hard to go. 
Were these things really spoken of the " in- 



6 POINTS OF VIEW. 

genious gentleman " of La Mancha, or of 
John Howard, or George Peabody, or per- 
haps Elizabeth Fry, — or is there no longer 
such a thing as a recognized absurdity in the 
world ? 

Another gloomy indication of the departure 
of humor from our midst is the tendency of 
philosophical writers to prove by analysis that, 
if they are not familiar with the thing itself, 
they at least know of what it should consist. 
Mr. Shorthouse's depressing views about Don 
Quixote are merely introduced as illustrating 
a very scholarly and comfortless paper on the 
subtle qualities of mirth. No one could deal 
more gracefully and less humorously with his 
topic than does Mr. Shorthouse, and we are 
compelled to pause every now and then and 
reassure ourselves as to the subject matter of 
his eloquence. Professor Everett has more 
recently and more cheerfully defined for us 
the Philosophy of the Comic, in a way which, 
if it does not add to our gayety, cannot be ac- 
cused of plunging us deliberately into gloom. 
He thinks, indeed, — and small wonder, — that 
there is " a genuine difficulty in distinguish- 
ing between the comic and the tragic," and 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 7 

that what we need is some formula which shall 
accurately interpret the precise qualities of 
each ; and he is disposed to illustrate his theory 
by dwelling on the tragic side of Falstaff, which 
is, of all injuries, the grimmest and hardest to 
forgive. Falstaff is now the forlorn hope of 
those who love to laugh, and when he is taken 
away from us, as soon, alas ! he will be, and 
sleeps with Don Quixote in the " dull cold 
marble " of an orthodox sobriety, how shall we 
make merry our souls ? Mr. George Radf ord, 
who enriched the first volume of " Obiter 
Dicta " with sugIi a loving study of the fat-wit- 
ted old knight, tells us reassuringly that by 
laughter man is distinguished from the beasts, 
though the cares and sorrows of life have all 
but deprived him of this elevating grace, and 
degraded him into a brutal solemnity. Then 
comes along a rare genius like Falstaff, who 
restores the power of laughter, and transforms 
the stolid brute once more into a man, and 
who accordingly has the highest claim to our 
grateful and affectionate regard. That there 
are those who persist in looking upon him 
as a selfish and worthless fellow is, from Mr. 
Radford's point of view, a sorrowful instance 



8 POINTS OF VIEW. 

of human thanklessness and perversity. But 
this I take to be the enamored and exagger- 
ated language of a too faithful partisan. Mor- 
ally speaking, Falstaff has not a leg to stand 
upon, and there is a tragic element lurking 
always amid the fun. But, seen in the broad 
sunlight of his transcendent humor, this 
shadow is as the half-pennyworth of bread to 
his own noble ocean of sack, and why should 
we be forever trying to force it into promi- 
nence ? When Charlotte Bronte advised her 
friend, Ellen Nussey, to read none of Shake- 
speare's comedies, she was not beguiled for a 
moment into regarding them as serious and 
melancholy lessons of life ; but with uncom- 
promising directness put them down as mere 
improper plays, the amusing qualities of which 
were insufficient to excuse their coarseness, 
and which were manifestly unfit for the " gen- 
tle Ellen's " eyes. 

In fact, humor would at all times have been 
the poorest excuse to offer to Miss Bronte 
for any form of moral dereliction, for it was 
the one quality she lacked herself, and failed 
to tolerate in others. Sam Weller was ap- 
parently as obnoxious to her as was Pal- 



A PLEA FOB HUMOR. 9 

staff, for she would not even consent to meet 
Dickens, when she was being lionized in Lon- 
don society, — a degree of abstemiousness 
on her part which it is disheartening to con- 
template. It does not seem too much to say 
that every shortcoming in Charlotte Bronte's 
admirable work, every limitation of her splen- 
did genius, arose primarily from her want 
of humor. Her severities of judgment — 
and who more severe than she ? — were due 
to the same melancholy cause ; for humor 
is the kindliest thing alive. Compare the 
harshness with which she handles her hap- 
less curates, and the comparative crudity of 
her treatment, with the surpassing lightness 
of Miss Austen's touch as she rounds and 
completes her immortal clerical portraits. 
Miss Bronte tells us, in one of her letters, that 
she regarded all curates as " highly uninter- 
esting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of 
the coarser sex," just as she found all the 
Belgian school-girls " cold, selfish, animal, and 
inferior." But to Miss Austen's keen and 
friendly eye the narrowest of clergymen was 
not wholly uninteresting, the most inferior of 
school-girls not without some claim to our con- 



10 POINTS OF VIEW. 

sideration ; even the coarseness of the male 
sex was far from vexing her maidenly seren- 
ity, probably because she was unacquainted 
with the Rochester type. Mr. Elton is cer- 
tainly narrow, Mary Bennet extremely infe- 
rior ; but their authoress only laughs at them 
softly, with a quiet tolerance, and a good- 
natured sense of amusement at their follies. 
It was little wonder that Charlotte Bronte, 
who had at all times the courage of her con- 
victions, could not, and would not, read Jane 
Austen's novels. " They have not got story 
enough for me," she boldly affirmed. " I 
don't want my blood curdled, but I like to 
have it stirred. Miss Austen strikes me as 
milk-and-watery, and, to say truth, as dull." 
Of course she did ! How was a woman, whose 
ideas of after-dinner conversation are embod- 
ied in the amazing language of Baroness In- 
gram and her titled friends, to appreciate the 
delicious, sleepy small talk, in "Sense and Sen- 
sibility," about the respective heights of the re- 
spective grandchildren ? It is to Miss Bronte's 
abiding lack of humor that we owe such 
stately caricatures as Blanche Ingram, and all 
the high-born, ill-bred company who gather 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 11 

in Thornfield Hall, like a group fresh from 
Madame Tussaud's ingenious workshop, and 
against whose waxen unreality Jane Eyre and 
Rochester, alive to their very finger-tips, con- 
trast like twin sparks of fire. It was her lack 
of humor, too, which beguiled her into as- 
serting that the forty " wicked, sophistical, 
and immoral French novels," which found 
their way down to lonely Haworth, gave her 
" a thorough idea of France and Paris," — alas, 
poor misjudged France ! — and which made 
her think Thackeray very nearly as wicked, 
sophistical, and immoral as the French novels. 
Even her dislike for children was probably 
due to the same irremediable misfortune ; for 
the humors of children are the only redeem- 
ing points amid their general naughtiness, and 
vexing misbehavior. Mr. Swinburne, guilt- 
less himself of any jocose tendencies, has made 
the unique discovery that Charlotte Bronte 
strongly resembles Cervantes, and that Paul 
Emanuel is a modern counterpart of Don 
Quixote ; and well it is for our poet that the 
irascible little professor never heard him hint 
at such a similarity. Surely, to use one of 
Mr. Swinburne's own incomparable expres- 



12 POINTS OF VIEW. 

sions, the parallel is no better than a " sub- 
simious absurdity." 

On the other hand, we are told that Miss 
Austen owed her lively sense of humor to her 
habit of dissociating the follies of mankind 
from any rigid standard of right and wrong ; 
which means, I suppose, that she never 
dreamed she had a mission. Nowadays, in- 
deed, no writer is without one. We cannot 
even read a paper upon gypsies, and not be- 
come aware that its author is deeply imbued 
with a sense of his personal responsibility 
for these agreeable rascals, whom he insists 
upon our taking seriously, — as if we wanted 
to have anything to do with them on such 
terms ! " Since the time of Carlyle," says Mr. 
Bagehot, " earnestness has been a favorite 
virtue in literature ; " but Carlyle, though 
sharing largely in that profound melancholy 
which he declared to be the basis of every 
English soul, and though he was unfortunate 
enough to think Pickwick sad trash, had nev- 
ertheless a grim and eloquent humor of his 
own. With him, at least, earnestness never 
degenerated into dullness ; and while dullness 
may be, as he unhesitatingly affirmed, the 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 13 

first requisite for a great and free people, yet 
a too heavy percentage of this valuable quality 
is fatal to the sprightly grace of literature. 
" In our times," said an old Scotchwoman, 
" there 's fully mony modern principles," and 
the first of these seems to be the substitution 
of a serious and critical discernment for the 
light-hearted sympathy of former days. Our 
grandfathers cried a little and laughed a good 
deal over their books, without the smallest 
sense of anxiety or responsibility in the mat- 
ter ; but we are called on repeatedly to face 
problems which we would rather let alone, to 
dive dismally into motives, to trace subtle con- 
nections, to analyze uncomfortable sensations, 
and to exercise in all cases a discreet and con- 
scientious severity, when what we really want 
and need is half an hour's amusement. There 
is no stronger proof of the great change that 
has swept over mankind than the sight of a 
nation which used to chuckle over " Tom 
Jones " absorbing a few years ago countless 
editions of " Robert Elsmere." What is droller 
still is that the people who read " Robert Els- 
mere" would think it wrong to enjoy "Tom 
Jones," and that the people who enjoyed "Tom 



14 POINTS OF VIEW. 

Jones " would have thought it wrong to read 
" Robert Elsmere ; " and that the people who, 
wishing to be on the safe side of virtue, think 
it wrong to read either, are scorned greatly as 
lacking true moral discrimination. 

Now he would be a brave man who would 
undertake to defend the utterly indefensible 
literature of the past. Where it was most 
humorous it was also most coarse, wanton, and 
cruel ; but, in banishing these objectionable 
qualities, we have effectually contrived to rid 
ourselves of the humor as well, and with it we 
have lost one of the safest instincts of our 
souls. Any book which serves to lower the 
sum of human gayety is a moral delinquent ; 
and instead of coddling it into universal no- 
tice, and growing owlish in its gloom, we 
should put it briskly aside in favor of brighter 
and pleasanter things. When Father Faber 
said that there was no greater help to a reli- 
gious life than a keen sense of the ridiculous, 
he startled a number of pious people, yet what 
a luminous and cordial message it was to help 
us on our way ! Mr. Birrell has recorded the 
extraordinary delight with which he came 
across some after-dinner sally of the Rev. 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 15 

Henry Martyn's ; for the very thought of that 
ardent and fiery spirit relaxing into pleasant- 
ries over the nuts and wine made him appear 
like an actual fellow-being of our own. It is 
with the same feeling intensified, as I have 
already noted, that we read some of the letters 
of the early fathers, — those grave and hal- 
lowed figures seen through a mist of centuries, 
— and find them jesting at one another in the 
gayest and least sacerdotal manner imaginable. 
" Who could tell a story with more wit, who 
could joke so pleasantly ? " sighs St. Gregory of 
Nazienzen of his friend St. Basil, remember- 
ing doubtless with a heavy heart the shafts 
of good-humored raillery that had brightened 
their lifelong intercourse. With what kindly 
and loving zest does Gregory, himself the most 
austere of men, mock at Basil's asceticism, — 
at those " sad and hungry banquets " of which 
he was invited to partake, those " ungarden- 
like gardens, void of pot-herbs," in which he 
was expected to dig ! With what delightful 
alacrity does Basil vindicate his reputation for 
humor by making a most excellent joke in 
court, for the benefit of a brutal magistrate 
who fiercely threatened to tear out his liver J 



16 POINTS OF VIEW. 

" Your intention is a benevolent one," said the 
saint, who had been for years a confirmed in- 
valid. " Where it is now located, it has given 
me nothing but trouble." Surely, as we read 
such an anecdote as this, we share in the 
curious sensation experienced by little Tom 
Tulliver, when, by dint of Maggie's repeated 
questions, he began slowly to understand that 
the Romans had once been real men, who were 
happy enough to speak their own language 
without any previous introduction to the Eton 
grammar. In like manner, when we come to 
realize that the fathers of the primitive Church 
enjoyed their quips and cranks and jests as 
much as do Mr. Trollope's jolly deans or 
vicars, we feel we have at last grasped the se- 
cret of their identity, and we appreciate the 
force of Father Faber's appeal to the frank 
spirit of a wholesome mirth. 

Perhaps one reason for the scanty tolerance 
that humor receives at the hands of the disaf- 
fected is because of the rather selfish way in 
which the initiated enjoy their fun ; for there 
is always a secret irritation about a laugh in 
which we cannot join. Mr. George Saints- 
bury is plainly of this way of thinking, and, 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 17 

being blessed beyond his fellows with a love 
for all that is jovial, he speaks from out of the 
richness of his experience. " Those who have 
a sense of humor," he says, " instead of being 
quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a 
little too apt to celebrate their joy in the face 
of the afflicted ones who have it not ; and the 
afflicted ones only follow a general law in pro- 
testing that it is a very worthless thing, if not 
a complete humbug." This spirit of exclu- 
siveness on the one side and of irascibility on 
the other may be greatly deplored, but who is 
there among us, I wonder, wholly innocent of 
blame ? Mr. Saintsbury himself confesses to 
a silent chuckle of delight when he thinks of 
the dimly veiled censoriousness with which 
Peacock's inimitable humor has been received 
by one half of the reading world. In other 
words, his enjoyment of the Rev. Drs. Folli- 
ott and Opimian is sensibly increased by the 
reflection that a great many worthy people, 
even among his own acquaintances, are, by 
some mysterious law of their being, debarred 
from any share in his pleasure. Yet surely 
we need not be so niggardly in this matter. 
There is wit enough in those two reverend 



18 POINTS OF VIEW. 

gentlemen to go all around the living earth, 
and leave plenty for generations now unborn. 
Each might say with Juliet, — 

" The more I give to thee, 
The more I have ; " 

for wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more 
lasting in its qualities. When Peacock de- 
scribes a country gentleman's range of ideas 
as "nearly commensurate with that of the 
great king Nebuchadnezzar when he was 
turned out to grass," he affords us a happy 
illustration of the eternal fitness of humor, 
for there can hardly come a time when such 
an apt comparison will fail to point its mean- 
ing. 

Mr. Birrell is quite as selfish in his felicity 
as Mr. Saintsbury, and perfectly frank in ac- 
knowledging it. He dwells rapturously over 
certain well-loved pages of " Pride and Preju- 
dice,'' and " Mansfield Park," and then de- 
liberately adds, " When an admirer of Miss 
Austen reads these familiar passages, the smile 
of satisfaction, betraying the deep inward peace 
they never fail to beget, widens, like ' a circle 
in the water,' as he remembers (and he is al- 
ways careful to remember) how his dearest 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 19 

friend, who has been so successful in life, can 
no more read Miss Austen than he can read 
the Moabitish Stone." The same peculiarity 
is noticeable in the more ardent lovers of 
Charles Lamb. They seem to want him all 
to themselves, look askance upon any fellow- 
being who ventures to assert a modest prefer- 
ence for their idol 9 and brighten visibly when 
some ponderous critic declares the Letters to 
be sad stuff, and not worth half the exasperat- 
ing nonsense talked about them. Yet Lamb 
flung his good things to the winds with charac- 
teristic prodigality, little recking by whom or 
in what spirit they were received. How many 
witticisms, I wonder, were roared into the deaf 
ears of old Thomas Westwood, who heard 
them not, alas, but who laughed all the same, 
out of pure sociability, and with a pleasant 
sense that something funny had been said! 
And what of that ill-fated pun which Lamb, 
in a moment of deplorable abstraction, let fall 
at a funeral, to the surprise and consternation 
of the mourners ? Surely a man who could 
joke at a funeral never meant his pleasantries 
to be hoarded up for the benefit of an initiated 
few, but would gladly see them the property 



20 POINTS OF VIEW. 

of all living men ; ay, and of all dead men, 
too, were such a distribution possible. " Damn 
the age ! I will write for antiquity ! " he ex- 
claimed, with not unnatural heat, when the 
"Gypsy's Malison " was rejected by the in- 
genious editors of the " Gem," on the ground 
that it would " shock all mothers ; " and even 
this expression, uttered with pardonable irrita- 
tion, manifests no solicitude for a narrow and 
esoteric audience. 

" Wit is useful for everything, but sufficient 
for nothing," says Amiel, who probably felt 
he needed some excuse for burying so much 
of his Gallic sprightliness in Teutonic gloom ; 
and dullness, it must be admitted, has the 
distinct advantage of being useful for every- 
body, and sufficient for nearly everybody as 
well. Nothing, we are told, is more rational 
than ennui ; and Mr. Bagehot, contemplating 
the " grave files of speechless men " who have 
always represented the English land, exults 
more openly and energetically even than Car- 
lyle in the saving dullness, the superb impene- 
trability, which stamps the Englishman, as it 
stamped the Roman, with the sign-manual of 
patient strength. Stupidity, he reminds us, 



A PLEA FOB HUMOR. 21 

is not folly, and moreover it often insures a 
valuable consistency. " ' What I says is this 
here, as I was a-saying yesterday,' is the av- 
erage Englishman's notion of historical elo- 
quence and habitual discretion." But Mr. 
Bagehot could well afford to trifle thus coyly 
with dullness, because he knew it only theo- 
retically and as a dispassionate observer. His 
own roof-tree is free from the blighting pres- 
ence ; his own pages are guiltless of the leaden 
touch. It has been well said that an ordinary 
mortal might live for a twelvemonth like a 
gentleman on Hazlitt's ideas ; but he might, if 
he were clever, shine all his life long with the 
reflected splendor of Mr. Bagehot's wit, and 
be thought to give forth a very respectable 
illumination. There is a telling quality in 
every stroke; a pitiless dexterity that drives 
the weapon, like a fairy's arrow, straight to 
some vital point. When we read that " of all 
pursuits ever invented by man for separating 
the faculty of argument from the capacity of 
belief, the art of debating is probably the 
most effective," we feel that an unwelcome 
statement has been expressed with Mephisto- 
phelian coolness ; and remembering that these 



22 POINTS OF VIEW. 

words were uttered before Mr. Gladstone had 
attained his parliamentary preeminence, we 
have but another proof of the imperishable 
accuracy of wit. Only say a clever thing, and 
mankind will go on forever furnishing living 
illustrations of its truth. It was Thurlow who 
originally remarked that " companies have nei- 
ther bodies to kick nor souls to lose," and the 
jest fits in so aptly with our every-day humors 
and experiences that I have heard men attrib- 
ute it casually to their friends, thinking, per- 
haps, that it must have been born in these 
times of giant corporations, of city railroads, 
and of trusts. What a gap between Queen 
Victoria and Queen Bess, what a thorough and 
far-reaching change in everything that goes to 
make up the life and habits of men ; and yet 
Shakespeare's fine strokes of humor have be- 
come so fitted to our common speech that the 
very unconsciousness with which we apply 
them proves how they tally with our modern 
emotions and opportunities. Lesser lights 
burn quite as steadily. Pope and Goldsmith 
reappear on the lips of people whose know- 
ledge of the " Essay on Man " is of the very 
haziest character, and whose acquaintance with 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 23 

"She Stoops to Conquer" is confined exclu- 
sively to Mr. Abbey's graceful illustrations. 
Not very long ago I heard a bright school-girl, 
when reproached for wet feet or some such 
youthful indiscretion, excuse herself gayly 
on the plea that she was " bullying Nature ; " 
and, knowing that the child was but modestly 
addicted to her books, I wondered how many 
of Dr. Holmes's trenchant sayings have be- 
come a heritage in our households, detached 
often from their original kinship, and seem- 
ing like the rightful property of every one 
who utters them. It is an amusing, barefaced, 
witless sort of robbery, yet surely not without 
its compensations ; for it must be a pleasant 
thing to reflect in old age that the general 
murkiness of life has been lit up here and 
there by sparks struck from one's youthful 
fire, and that these sparks, though they wan- 
der occasionally masterless as will-o'-the-wisps, 
are destined never to go out. 

Are destined never to go out ! In its vital- 
ity lies the supreme excellence of humor. 
Whatever has u wit enough to keep it sweet " 
defies corruption and outlasts all time ; but 
the wit must be of that outward and visible 



24 POINTS OF VIEW. 

order which needs no introduction or demon- 
stration at our hands. It is an old trick with 
dull novelists to describe their characters as 
being exceptionally brilliant people, and to 
trust that we will take their word for it, and 
ask no further proof. Every one remembers 
how Lord Beaconsfield would tell us that a 
cardinal could " sparkle with anecdote and 
blaze with repartee ; " and how utterly desti- 
tute of sparkle or blaze were the specimens 
of his eminence's conversation with which we 
were subsequently favored. Those " lively 
dinners " in " Endymion " and " Lothair," at 
which we were assured the brightest minds in 
England loved to gather, became mere Barme- 
cide feasts when reported to us without a sin- 
gle amusing remark ; such waifs and strays of 
conversation as reached our ears being of the 
dreariest and most fatuous description. It is 
not so with the real masters of their craft. 
Mr. Peacock does not stop to explain to us 
that Dr. Folliott is witty. The reverend gen- 
tleman opens his mouth and acquaints us with 
the fact himself. There is no need for George 
Eliot to expatiate on Mrs. Poyser's humor. 
Five minutes of that lady's society is amply 



A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 25 

sufficient for the revelation. We do not even 
hear Mr. Poyser and the rest of the family en- 
larging delightedly on the subject, as do all 
of Lawyer Putney's friends, in Mr. Howells's 
story, " Annie Kilburn ; " and yet even the 
united testimony of Hatboro' fails to clear up 
our lingering doubts concerning Mr. Putney's 
wit. The dull people of that soporific town are 
really and truly and realistically dull. There 
is no mistaking them. The stamp of veracity 
is upon every brow. They pay morning calls, 
and we listen to their conversation with a 
dreamy impression that we have heard it all 
many times before, and that the ghosts of our 
own morning calls are revisiting us, not in the 
glimpses of the moon, but in Mr. Howells's deco- 
rous and quiet pages. That curious conviction 
that we have formerly passed through a pre- 
cisely similar experience is strong upon us as 
we read, and it is the most emphatic testimony 
to the novelist's peculiar skill. But there is 
none of this instantaneous acquiescence in Mr. 
Putney's wit ; for although he does make one 
very nice little joke, ifc is hardly enough to fla- 
vor all his conversation, which is for the most 
part rather unwholesome than humorous. The 



26 POINTS OF VIEW. 

only way to elucidate him is to suppose that 
Mr. Howells, in sardonic mood, wishes to show 
us that if a man be discreet enough to take to 
hard drinking in his youth, before his general 
emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably 
credit him with a host of shining qualities 
which, we are given to understand, lie balked 
and frustrated by his one unfortunate weak- 
ness. How many of us know these exception- 
ally brilliant lawyers, doctors, politicians, and 
journalists, who bear a charmed reputation, 
based exclusively upon their inebriety, and 
who take good care not to imperil it by too 
long a relapse into the mortifying self-revela- 
tions of soberness ! And what wrong has been 
done to the honored name of humor by these 
pretentious rascals ! ^We do not love Falstaff 
because he is drunk ; we do not admire Becky 
Sharp because she is wicked. Drunkenness 
and wickedness are things easy of imitation ; 
yet all the sack in Christendom could not be- 
get us another Falstaff, — though Seithenyn 
ap Seithyn comes very near to the incompar- 
able model, — and all the wickedness in the 
world could not fashion us a second Becky 
Sharp, j There are too many dull topers and 



A PLEA FOB HUMOR. 27 

stupid sinners among mankind to admit of 
any uncertainty on those points. 

Bishop Burnet, in describing Lord Halifax, 
tells us, with thinly veiled disapprobation, that 
he was " a man of fine and ready wit, full of 
life, and very pleasant, but much turned to 
satire. His imagination was too hard for his 
judgment, and a severe jest took more with 
him than all arguments whatever." Yet this 
was the first statesman of his age, and one 
whose clear and tranquil vision penetrated 
so far beyond the turbulent, troubled times 
he lived iu, that men looked askance upon a 
power they but dimly understood. The sturdy 
" Trimmer," who would be bullied neither 
by king nor commons, who would " speak his 
mind and not be hanged as long as there was 
law in England," must have turned with in- 
finite relief from the horrible medley of plots 
and counterplots, from the ugly images of 
Oates and Dangerfield, from the scaffolds of 
Stafford and Russell and Sidney, from the 
Bloody Circuit and the massacre of Glencoe, 
from the false smiles of princes and the howl- 
ing arrogance of the mob, to any jest, how- 
ever "severe," which would restore to him 



28 POINTS OF VIEW. 

his cold and fastidious serenity, and keep his 
judgment and his good temper unimpaired. 
" Ridicule is the test of truth," said Hazlitt, 
and it is a test which Halifax remorselessly- 
applied, and which would not be without its 
uses to the Trimmer of to-day, in whom this 
adjusting sense is lamentably lacking. For 
humor distorts nothing, and only false gods 
are laughed off their earthly pedestals. What 
monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have re- 
sisted whole batteries of serious arguments, 
and then crumbled swiftly into dust before 
the ringing death-knell of a laugh ! What 
healthy exultation, what genial warmth, what 
loyal brotherhood of mirth, attends the friendly 
sound ! Yet in labeling our life and litera- 
ture, as the Danes labeled their Royal Theatre 
in Copenhagen, " Not for amusement merely," 
we have pushed one step further, and the 
legend too often stands, " Not for amusement 
at all." Life is no laughing matter, we are 
told, which is true ; and, what is still more 
dismal to contemplate, books are no laughing 
matters, either. Only now and then some gay, 
defiant rebel, like Mr. Saintsbury, flaunts the 
old flag, hums a bar of " Blue Bonnets over 



A PLEA FOE HUMOR. 29 

the Border," and ruffles the quiet waters of our 
souls by hinting that this age of Apollinaris 
and of lectures is at fault, and that it has 
produced nothing which can vie as literature 
with the products of the ages of wine and 
songo 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 

In a fair and far-off country, hidden to 
none, though visited by few, dwell a little 
band of lovely ladies, to whose youth and ra- 
diance the poets have added the crowning gift 
of immortality. There they live, with faint 
alluring smiles that never fade ; and at their 
head is Helen of Troy, white-bosomed, azure- 
eyed, to whom men forgave all things for her 
beauty's sake. There, too, is Lesbia, fair and 
false, laughing at a broken heart, but hold- 
ing close and tenderly the dead sparrow 

" That, living, never strayed from her sweet breast." 

She kisses its ruffled wings and weeps, she 
who had no tears to spare when Catullus sung 
and sued. And there is Myrto, beloved by 
Theocritus, her naked feet gleaming like 
pearls, a bunch of Coan rushes pressed in 
her rosy ringers ; and the nameless girl who 
held in check Anacreon's wandering heart 
with the magic of dimples, and parted lips, 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 31 

and thin purple floating garments. With these 
are later beauties : Fiammetta the ruddy- 
haired, whom death snatched from Boccaccio's 
arms, and the gentle Catarina, raising those 
heavy-lidded eyes that Camoens loved and 
lost ; Petrarch's Laura, robed in pale green 
spotted with violets, one golden curl escaping 
wantonly beneath her veil ; the fair blue-stock- 
ing, Leonora d'Este, pale as a rain-washed 
rose, her dress in sweet disorder ; and Bea- 
trice, with the stillness of eternity in her 
brooding eyes. If we listen, we hear the shrill 
laughter of Mignonne, a child of fifteen sum- 
mers, mocking at Ronsard's wooing; or we 
catch the gentler murmur of Highland Mary's 
song. She blushes a little, the low-born 
lass, and sinks her graceful head, as though 
abashed by the fame her peasant lover brought 
her. Barefooted, yellow - haired, she passes 
swiftly by ; and with her, hand in hand, walks 
Scotland's queen, sad Jane Beaufort, " the 
fairest younge floure " that ever won the heart 
of royal captive and suffered the martyrdom 
of love. England sends to that far land Stella, 
with eyes like stars, and a veil of gossamer 
hiding her delicate beauty, and Celia, and 



32 POINTS OF VIEW. 

false Lucasta, and Castara, tantalizingly dis- 
creet, in whose dimples Cupid is fain to linger 
sighing, exiled, poor frozen god, from the 

" Chaste nunnery of her breasts." 

Sacharissa, too, stands near, with a shade of 
listlessness in her sweet eyes, as though she 
wearied a little of Master Waller's courtly 
strains. A withered rose droops from her 
white fingers, preaching its mute sermon, and 
preaching it all in vain; for rose and lady 
live forever, linked to each other's fame. And 
by her side, casting her fragile loveliness in 
the shade, is one of different mould, a sump- 
tuous, smiling woman, on whom Sacharissa's 
blue eyes fall with a soft disdain. We know 
this indolent beauty by the brave vibration 
of her tempestuous silken robe, by the ruby 
carcanet that clasps her throat, the rainbow 
ribbon around her slender waist, the jewels 
wedged knuckle-deep on every tapering finger, 
and even — oh, vanity of vanities ! — on one 
small rosy thumb. We know her by the 
scented beads upon her arm, and by the sweet 
and subtle odors of storax and spikenard and 
galbanum that breathe softly forth from her 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 33 

brocaded bodice, and from her hair's dark 
meshes caught in a golden net. It is she to 
whom the glow-worms lent their eyes, and the 
elves their wings, and the stars their shooting 
fires, as she wandered through the dewy woods 
to meet her lover's steps. It is Herrick's 
Julia whom we see so clearly through the mist 
of centuries, that cannot veil nor dim the 
brightness of her presence. 

To ask how many of these fair dames have 
gone through the formality of living, and how 
many exist only by the might of a poet's 
breath, is but a thankless question. All share 
alike in that true being which may not be 
blown out like the flame of a taper ; in that 
true entity which Caesar and Hamlet hold in 
common, and which reveals them side by side. 
Mr. Gosse, for example, assures us that Julia 
really walked the earth, and even gives us 
some details of her mundane pilgrimage ; 
other critics smile, and shake their heads, and 
doubt. It matters not ; she lives, and she 
will continue to live when we who dispute the 
matter lie voiceless in our graves. The es- 
sence of her personality lingers on every page 
where Herrick sings of her. His verse is 



34 POINTS OF VIEW. 

heavy with her spicy perfumes, glittering with 
her many-colored jewels, lustrous with the 
shimmer of her silken petticoats. Her very 
shadow, he sighs, distills sweet odors on the 
air, and draws him after her, faint with their 
amorous languor. How lavish she is with her 
charms, this woman who neither thinks nor 
suffers; who prays, indeed, sometimes, with 
great serenity, and dips her snowy finger in 
the font of blessed water, but whose spiritual 
humors pale before the calm vigor of her 
earthly nature ! How kindly, how tranquil, 
how unmoved, she is ; listening with the same 
slow smile to her lover's fantastic word-play, 
to the fervid conceits with which he beguiles 
the summer idleness, and to the frank and 
sudden passion with which he conjures her, 
" dearest of thousands," to close his eyes when 
death shall summon him, to shed some true 
tears above the sod, to clasp forever the book 
in which he writes her name ! How gently 
she would have fulfilled these last sad duties 
had the discriminating fates called her to his 
bier ; how fragrant the sighs she would have 
wafted in that darkened chamber ; how sin- 
cere the temperate sorrow for a remediable 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 35 

loss! And then, out into the glowing sun- 
light, where life is sweet, and the world ex- 
ults, and the warm blood tingles in our veins, 
and, underneath the scattered primrose blos- 
soms, the frozen dead lie forgotten in their 
graves. 

What gives to the old love-songs their pe- 
culiar felicity, their undecaying brightness, is 
this constant sounding of a personal note ; 
this artless candor with which we are taken 
by the hand and led straight into the lady's 
presence, are bidden to admire her beauty and 
her wit, are freely reminded of her faults and 
her caprices, and are taught, with many a 
sigh and tear, and laughter bubbling through- 
out all, what a delicious and unprofitable pas- 
time is the love-making of a poet. 

" I lose but what was never mine," 

sings Carew with gay philosophy, contemplat- 
ing the perfidious withdrawal of Celia's kind- 
ness ; and after worshiping hotly at her shrine, 
and calling on all the winds of heaven to wit- 
ness his desires, he accepts his defeat with 
undimmed brow, and with melodious frankness 
returns the false one her disdain : — 



36 POINTS OF VIEW. 

" No tears, Celia, now shall win 

My resolved heart to return ; 
I have searched thy soul within, 

And find naught but pride and scorn. 
I have learned thy arts, and now 
Can disdain as much as thou." 

From which heroic altitude we see him pres- 
ently descending to protest with smiling lips 
that love shall part with his arrows and the 
doves of Venus with their pretty wings, that 
the sun shall fade and the stars fall blinking 
from the skies, that heaven shall lose its de- 
lights and hell its torments, that the very fish 
shall burn in the cool waters of the ocean, if 
he forsakes or neglects his Celia's embraces. 

It was Carew, indeed, who first sounded 
these " courtly amorous strains " throughout 
the English land ; who first taught his fellow- 
poets that to sing of love was not the occa- 
sional pastime, but the serious occupation of 
their lives. Yet what an easy, indolent suitor 
he is ! What lazy raptures over Celia's eyes 
and lips ! What finely poised compliments, 
delicate as rose leaves, and well fitted for the 
inconstant beauty who listened, with faint 
blushes and transient interest, to the song ! 
" He loved wine and roses," says Mr. Gosse, 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 37 

" and fair florid women, to whom lie could 
indite joyous or pensive poems about their 
comeliness, adoring it while it lasted, regret- 
ting it when it faded. He has not the same 
intimate love of detail as Herrick ; we miss in 
his poetry those realistic touches that give 
such wonderful freshness to the verses of the 
younger poet ; but the habit of the two men's 
minds was very similar. Both were pagans, 
and given up to an innocent hedonism ; nei- 
ther was concerned with much beyond the 
eternal commonplaces of bodily existence, the 
attraction of beauty, the mutability of life, 
the brevity and sweetness of enjoyment." 

These things are quite enough, however, to 
make exceedingly good poets, Mrs. Browning 
to the contrary, notwithstanding. " I never 
mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, 
nor leisure for the hour of the poet," wrote 
the authoress of "Aurora Leigh," and we quail 
before the deadly earnestness of the avowal. 
But pleasure and leisure between them have 
begotten work far more complete and artistic 
than anything Mrs. Browning ever gave to an 
admiring world. Pleasure and leisure are re- 
sponsible for "L' Allegro" and "II Penseroso," 



38 POINTS OF VIEW. 

for " Kubla Khan " and " The Eve of St. Ag- 
nes," for " Tarn O'Shanter," and " A Dream 
of Fair Women," and " The Bells." There is 
so much talk about Herrick's paganism that it 
has become one of the things we credit without 
inquiry; shrugging our shoulders over Corinna 
and her May blossoms, and passing by that 
devout prayer of thanksgiving for the simple 
blessings of life, for the loaf and the cup, the 
winter hearthstone and the summer sun. There 
is such a widely diffused belief in the necessity 
for a serious and urgent motive in art that 
we have grown to think less of the outward 
construction of a poem than of the dominant 
impulse which evoked it. Mrs. Browning, 
with all her noble idealism and her profound 
sense of responsibility, was most depressingly 
indifferent about form, and was quite a law 
to herself in the matter of rhymes. Carew, 
whose avowed object was to flatter Celia pid 
Celia's fair rivals, proved himself " enamored 
of perfection," and wrought with infinite care 
and delicacy upon his fragile little verses. If 
he only played at love-making, he was seri- 
ous enough as a poet ; and, amid the careless 
exuberance of his time, he came to be re- 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 39 

garded, like Flaubert some generations later, 
as a veritable martyr to style. He brought 
forth his lyrical children, complained Sir John 
Suckling, with trouble and pain, instead of 
with that light - hearted spontaneity which 
distinguished his contemporaries, and which 
made their poetry so deliciously easy to write, 
and so generally unprofitable to read. Suck- 
ling himself, and Lovelace, and the host of 
courtly writers who toyed so gracefully and so 
joyously with their art, ignored for the most 
part all severity of workmanship, and made it 
their especial pride to compose with gentle- 
manly ease. The result may be seen in a 
mass of half-forgotten rubbish, and in a few 
incomparable songs, which are as fresh and 
lovely to-day as when they first rang the 
praises of Lucasta, or the fair Althea, or 
Chloris, the favorite daughter of wanton 
Aphrodite. They are the models for all love- 
songs and for all time, and, in their delicate 
beauty, they endure like fragile pieces of por- 
celain, to prove how light a thing can bear the 
weight of immortality. We cannot surpass 
them, we cannot steal their vivacious grace, 
we cannot feel ourselves first in a field where 



40 POINTS OF VIEW. 

such delicious and unapproachable things have 
been already whispered. 

" Ah ! f rustics par les anciens hommes, 
Nous sentons le regret jaloux, 
Qu'ils aient e*te* ce que nous sommes, 
Qu'ils aient eu nos eceurs avant nous." 

The best love-poems of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries amply fulfill the require- 
ments suggested by Southey : their sentiment 
is always " necessary, and voluptuous, and 
right." They are no " made-dishes at the 
Muses' banquet," but each one appears as the 
embodiment of a passing emotion. In those 
three faultless little verses " Going to the 
Wars," a single thought is presented us, — 
regretful love made heroic by the loyal fare- 
well of the soldier suitor : — 

" Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, 
That from the nunnery 
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 
To war and arms I flee. 

" True, a new mistress now I chase, 
The first foe in the field, 
And, with a stronger faith, embrace 
A sword, a horse, a shield. 

" Yet this inconstancy is such 
As you too shall adore, — 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 41 

I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honour more." 

In the still more beautiful lines, " To Althea 
from Prison," passion, made dignified by suf- 
fering, rewards with lavish hand the captive, 
happy with his chains : — 

" If I have freedom in my love, 
And in my soul am free, 
Angels alone, that soar above, 
Enjoy such liberty." 

In both poems there is a tempered delicacy, 
revealing the finer grain of that impetuous 
soul which wrecked itself so harshly in the 
stormy waters of life. Whether we think of 
Lovelace as the spoiled darling of a voluptu- 
ous court, or as dying of want in a cellar ; 
whether we picture him as sighing at the feet 
of beauty, or as fighting stoutly for his country 
and his king ; whether he is winning all hearts 
by the resistless charms of voice and pres- 
ence, or returning broken from battle to suffer 
the bitterness of poverty and desertion, we 
know that in his two famous lyrics we possess 
the real and perfect fruit, the golrlen harvest, 
of that troubled and many-sided existence. 
A still smaller gleaning comes to us from Sir 



42 POINTS OF VIEW. 

Charles Sedley, who, for two hundred years, 
has been preserved from oblivion by a little 
wanton verse about Phillis, full of such good- 
natured contentment and disbelief that we 
grow young and cheerful again in contem- 
plating it. Should any long-suffering reader 
desire to taste the sweets of sudden contrast 
and of sharp reaction, let him turn from the 
strenuous, analytic, half-caustic, and wholly 
discomforting love-poem of the nineteenth cen- 
tury — Mr. Browning's word-picture of " A 
Pretty Woman," for example — back to those 
swinging and jocund lines where Phillis, 

" Faithless as the winds or seas," 

smiles furtively upon her suitor, whose clear- 
sightedness avails him nothing, and who plays 
the game merrily to the end : — 

"She deceiving*, 

I believing, 

What need lovers wish for more ? " 

We who read are very far from wishing for 
anything more. With the Ettrick Shepherd, 
we are fain to remember that old tunes, and 
old songs, and well-worn fancies are best fitted 
for so simple and so ancient a theme : — 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 43 

" A' the world lias been in love at ae time 
or ither o' its life, and kens best hoo to ex- 
press its ain passion. What see you ever in 
love-sangs that 's at a' new ? Never ae single 
word. It 's just the same thing over again, 
like a vernal shower patterin' amang the bud- 
din' words. But let the lines come sweetly, 
and saftly, and a wee wildly too, frae the lips 
of Genius, and they shall delight a' mankind, 
and womankind too, without ever wearyin' 
them, whether they be said or sung. But try 
to be original, to keep aff a' that ever has been 
said afore, for fear o' plagiarism, or in ambi- 
tion o' originality, and your poem 'ill be like a 
bit o' ice that you hae taken into your mouth 
unawares for a lump o' white sugar." 

Burns's unrivaled songs come the nearest, 
perhaps, to realizing this charming bit of de- 
scription ; and the Shepherd, anticipating 
Schopenhauer's philosophy of love, is quite as 
prompt as Burns to declare its promise sweeter 
than its fulfillment : — 

" Love is a soft, bright, balmy, tender, tri- 
umphant, and glorious lie, in place of which 
nature offers us in mockery, during a' the 
rest o' our lives, the puir, paltry, pitiful, 



44 POINTS OF VIEW. 

fusionless, faded, cauldrified, and chittering 
substitute, Truth ! " 

This is not precisely the way in which we 
suffer ourselves nowadays to talk about truth, 
but a few generations back, people still cher- 
ished a healthy predilection for the comforta- 
ble delusions of life. Mingling with the mu- 
sic of the sweet old love-songs, lurking amid 
their passionate protestations, there is always 
a subtle sense of insecurity, a good-humored 
desire to enjoy the present, and not peer too 
closely into the perilous uncertainties of the 
future. Their very exaggerations, the quaint 
and extravagant conceits which offend our 
more exacting taste, are part of this general 
determination to be wisely blind to the ill-bred 
obtrusiveness of facts. Accordingly there is 
no staying the hand of an Elizabethan poet, 
or of his successor under the Restoration, when 
either undertakes to sing his lady's praises. 
Sun, moon, and skies bend down to do her 
homage, and to acknowledge their own com- 
parative dimness. 

" Stars, indeed, fair creatures be," 

admits Wither indulgently, and pearls and 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 45 

rubies are not without their merits ; but when 
the beauty of Arete dawns upon him, all 
things else seem dull and vapid by her side. 
Nay, his poetry, even, is born of her complai- 
sance, his talents are fostered by her smiles, he 
gains distinction only as her favor may per- 
mit. 

" I no skill in numbers had, 
More than every shepherd's lad, 
Till she taught me strains that were 
Pleasing to her gentle ear. 
Her fair splendour and her worth 
From obseureness drew me forth. 
And, because I had no muse, 
She herself deigned to infuse 
All the skill by which I climb 
To these praises in my rhyme." 

Donne, the most ardent of lovers and the 
most crabbed of poets, who united a great de- 
votion to his fond and faithful wife with a re- 
markably poor opinion of her sex in general, 
pushed his adulations to the extreme verge of 
absurdity. We find him writing to a lady 
sick of a fever that she cannot die because all 
creation would perish with her, — 

" The whole world vapours in thy breath.' ' 

After which ebullition, it is hardly a matter 



46 POINTS OF VIEW. 

of surprise to know that he considered females 
in the light of creatures whom it had pleased 
Providence to make fools. 

* ' Hope not for mind in women ! ' ' 

is his warning cry ; at their best, a little sweet- 
ness and a little wit form all their earthly por- 
tion. Yet the note of true passion struck by 
Donne in those glowing addresses, those de- 
jected farewells to his wife, echoes like a cry 
of rapture and of pain out of the stillness of 
the past. Her sorrow at the parting rends 
his heart ; if she but sighs, she sighs his soul 
away. 

" When thou weep'st, unkindly kind, 
My life's blood doth decay. 
It cannot be 
That thou lov'st me, as thou say'st, 
If in thine my life thou waste ; 
Thou art the life of me." 

Again, in that strange poem " A Valediction 
of Weeping," he finds her tears more than he 
can endure ; and, with the fond exaggeration 
of a lover, he entreats forbearance in her 
grief : — 

" O more than moon, 
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere ; 
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 47 

To teach the sea what it may do too soon. 
Let not the wind example find 
To do me more harm than it purposeth ; 
Since thou and I sigh one another's breath, 
Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's 
death." 

There is a lingering sweetness in these lines, 
for all their manifest unwisdom, that is sur- 
passed only by a pathetic sonnet of Drayton's, 
where the pain of parting, bravely borne at 
first, grows suddenly too sharp for sufferance, 
and the lover's pride breaks and melts into 
the passion of a last appeal : — 

" Since there 's no helpe, — come, let us kisse and parte. 
Nay, I have done, — you get no more of me ; 
And I am glad, — yea, glad with all my hearte, 
That thus so cleanly I myself can free. 
Shake hands forever ! — cancel all our vows ; 
And when we meet at any time againe, 
Be it not seene in either of our brows, 
That we one jot of former love retaine. 

" Now — at the last gaspe of Love's latest breath — 
When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies ; 
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, 
And Innocence is closing up his eyes, 
Now ! if thou would' st — when all have given him 

over — 
From death to life thou might' st him yet recover.' ' 

Here, at least, we have grace of sentiment 



48 POINTS OF VIEW. 

and beauty of form combined to make a per- 
fect whole. It seems strange indeed that Mr. 
Saintsbury, who gives such generous praise to 
Drayton's patriotic poems, his legends, his 
epistles, even his prose prefaces, should have 
no single word to spare for this most tender 
and musical of leave-takings. 

As for the capricious humors and over- 
wrought imagery which disfigure so many of 
the early love-songs, they have received their 
full allotment of censure, and have provoked 
the scornful mirth of critics too staid or too 
sensitive to be tolerant. We hear more of 
them, sometimes, than of the merits which 
should win them forgiveness. Lodge, daz- 
zled by Rosalynde's beauty, is ill disposed to 
pass lightly over the catalogue of her charms. 
Her lips are compared to budded roses, her 
teeth to ranks of lilies ; her eyes are 

" sapphires set in snow, 
Refining heaven by every wink," 

her cheeks are blushing clouds, and her neck 
is a stately tower where the god of love lies 
captive. All things in nature contribute to 
her excellence : — 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 49 

" With Orient pearl, with ruby red, 

With marble white, with sapphire blue, 
Her body every way is fed, 

Yet soft to touch, and sweet in view." 

But when this fair representative of all flow- 
ers and gems, "smiling to herself to think 
of her new entertained passion," lifts up the 
music of her voice in that enchanting madri- 
gal,— 

" Love in my bosom, like a bee, 
Doth suck his sweet ; 
Now with his wings he plays with me, 
Now with his feet," — 

we know her at once for the kinswoman and 
precursor of another and dearer Rosalind, 
who, with boyish swagger and tell-tale grace, 

" like a ripe sister," 

gathers from the trees of Arden the first fruits 
of Orlando's love. It was Lodge who pointed 
the way to that enchanted forest, where exiles 
and rustics waste the jocund hours, where toil 
and care are alike forgotten, where amorous 
verse-making represents the serious occupa- 
tion of life, and where the thrice fortunate 
Jaques can afford to dally with melancholy for 
lack of any cankering sorrow at his heart. 



50 POINTS OF VIEW. 

William Habbington, who sings to us with 
such monotonous sweetness of Castara's inno- 
cent joys, surpasses Lodge alike in the charm 
of his descriptions and in the extravagance of 
his follies. In reading him we are sharply- 
reminded of Klopstock's warning, that " a 
man should speak of his wife as seldom and 
with as much modesty as of himself;" for 
Habbington, who glories in the fairness and 
the chastity of his spouse, becomes unduly 
boastful now and then in vaunting these per- 
fections to the world. He, at least, being 
safely married to Castara, feels none of that 
haunting insecurity which disturbs his fellow- 
poets. 

" All her vows religious be, 
And her love she vows to me," 

he says complacently, and then stops to assure 
us in plain prose that she is " so unvitiated by 
conversation with the world that the subtle- 
minded of her sex would deem it ignorance." 
Even to her husband-lover she is " thrifty of 
a kiss," and in the marble coldness and purity 
of her breast his glowing roses find a chilly 
sepulchre. Cupid, perishing, it would seem, 
from a mere description of her merits, or, as 
Habbington singularly expresses it, — 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 51 

11 But if you, when this you hear, 
Fall down murdered through your ear," 

is, by way of compensation, decently interred 
in the dimpled cheek which has so often been 
his lurking-place. Lilies and roses t and vio- 
lets exhale their odors around him, a beau- 
teous sheet of lawn is drawn up over his cold 
little body, and all who see the "perfumed 
hearse " — presumably the dimple — envy the 
dead god, blest in his repose. This is as bad 
in its way as Lovelace's famous lines on " El- 
linda's Glove," where that modest article of 
dress is compelled to represent in turn a snow- 
white farm with five tenements, whose fair 
mistress has deserted them, an ermine cabinet 
too small and delicate for any occupant but 
its own, and a fiddle-case without its fine- 
tuned instrument. Dr. Thomas Campion, 
who, after rhyming delightfully all his life, 
was pleased to write a treatise against that 
"vulgar and artificial custom," compares his 
lady's face, in one musical little song, to a fer- 
tile garden, and her lips to ripe cherries, 
which none may buy or steal because her eyes, 
like twin angels, have them in keeping, and 
her brows, like bended bows, defend such 
treasures from the crowd. 



52 POINTS OF VIEW. 

" Those cherries fairly do enclose 
Of Orient pearl a double row, 
Which, when her lovely laughter shows, 

They look like rose-buds filled with snow ; 
Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy, 
Till ' Cherry ripe ' themselves do cry." 

This dazzling array of mixed metaphors 
with which the early poets love to bewilder us, 
and the whimsical conceits which must have 
cost them many laborious hours, have at least 
one redeeming merit: they are for the most 
part illustrative of the lady's graces, and not 
of the writer's lacerated heart. They tell us, 
seldom indeed with Herrick's intimate realism, 
but with many quaint and suspicious exag- 
gerations, whether the fair one was false or 
fond, light or dark, serious or flippant, gentle 
or high-spirited; what fashion of clothes she 
wore, what jewels and flowers were her adorn- 
ment : and these are the things we take plea- 
sure in knowing. It is Mr. Gosse's especial 
grievance against Waller that he does not en- 
lighten us on such points. " We can form," 
he complains, " but a very vague idea of Lady 
Dorothy Sidney from the Sacharissa poems ; 
she is everywhere overshadowed by the poet 
himself. We are told that she can sleep 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 53 

when she pleases, and this inspires a copy of 
verses ; but later on we are told that she can 
do anything but sleep when she pleases, and 
this leads to another copy of verses, which 
leave us exactly where we were when we 
started." Indeed, those who express surprise 
at Sacharissa's coldness have perhaps failed to 
notice the graceful chill of her lover's poems. 
" Cupid might have clapped him on the shoul- 
der, but we could warrant him heart-whole." 
For seven years he carried on his languid and 
courtly suit without once warming to the pas- 
sion point; and when Lady Dorothy at last 
made up her mind to marry somebody else, he 
expressed his cordial acquiescence in her views 
in a most charming and playful letter to her 
young sister, Lady Lucy Sidney, — a letter 
containing just enough well-bred regret to 
temper its wit and gayety. He had fulfilled 
his part in singing the praises of his mistress, 
in preaching to her sweetly through the soft 
petals of a rose, and in sighing with gentle 
complacency over the happy girdle which 
bound her slender waist. 

" A narrow compass, and yet there 
Dwelt all that 's good, and all that 's fair ; 



54 POINTS OF VIEW. 

Give me but this ribbon bound 

Take all the rest the sun goes round." 

Here we have the prototype of that other 
and more familiar cincture which clasped the 
Miller's Daughter; and it must be admit- 
ted that Lord Tennyson's maiden, with her 
curls, and her jeweled ear-rings, and the neck- 
lace rising and falling all day long upon her 
" balmy bosom," is more suggestive of a court 
beauty, like the fair Sacharissa, th&n of a 
buxom village girl. 

The most impersonal, however, of all the 
poet-lovers is Sir Philip Sidney, who, in the 
hundred and eight sonnets dedicated to Stella, 
has managed to tell us absolutely nothing 
about her. The atmosphere of haunting indi- 
viduality which gives these sonnets their half- 
bitter flavor, and which made them a living 
power in the stormy days of Elizabethan 
poetry, reveals to us, not Stella, but Astro- 
phel ; not Penelope Devereux, but Sidney 
himself, bruised by regrets and resentful of 
his fate. They are not by any means passion- 
ate love-songs ; they are not even sanguine 
enough to be persuasive ; they are steeped 
throughout in a pungent melancholy, too rest- 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 55 

less for resignation, too gentle for anger, too 
manly for vain self-indulgence. In their deli- 
cacy and their languor we read the story of 
that lingering suit which lacked the elation of 
success and the heart-break of failure. In- 
deed, Sidney seems never to have been a very 
ardent lover until the lady was taken away 
from him and married to Lord Rich, when he 
bewailed her musically for a couple of years, 
and then consoled himself with Frances Wal- 
singham, who must have found the sonnets to 
her rival pleasant reading for her leisure 
hours. This is the bald history of that poetic 
passion which made the names of Stella and 
Astrophel famous in English song, and which 
stirred the disgust of Horace Walpole, whose 
appreciation of such tender themes was of a 
painfully restricted nature. In their thought- 
ful, introspective, and self -revealing character, 
Sidney's love-poems bear a closer likeness to 
the genius of the nineteenth than to that of 
the sixteenth century. If we want to see the 
same spirit at work, we have but to take up 
the fifty sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
called " The House of Life," wherein the 
writer's soul is clearly reflected, but no glimpse 



56 POINTS OF VIEW. 

is vouchsafed us of the woman who has dis- 
turbed its depth. Their vague, sweet pathos, 
their brooding melancholy, their reluctant ac- 
ceptance of a joyless mood, are all familiar 
features in the earlier poet. Such verses as 
those beginning, — 

" Look in my face ; my name is Might-have-been ; 
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell/ ' 

are of the self-same mintage as Sidney's 
golden coins, only more modern, and perhaps 
more perfect in form, and a trifle more shad- 
owy in substance. If Sidney shows us but 
little of Stella, and if that little is, judged by 
the light of her subsequent career, not very 
accurately represented, Eossetti far surpasses 
him in unconscious reticence. He is not un- 
willing to analyze, — few recent poets are, — 
but his analysis lays bare only the tumult of 
his own heart, the lights and shades of his 
own delicate and sensitive nature. 

It was Sidney, however, who first pointed 
out to women, with clear insistence, the ad- 
vantage of having poets for lovers, and the 
promise of immortality thus conferred on 
them. He entreats them to listen kindly to 
those who can sing their praises to the world. 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 57 

" For so doing you shall be most fair, most 
wise, most rich, most everything ! You shall 
feed upon superlatives." Carew, adopting the 
same tone, and less gallant than Wither, who 
refers even his own fame to Arete's kindling 
glances, tells the flaunting Celia very plainly 
that she owes her dazzling prominence to him 
alone. 

11 Know, Celia ! since thou art so proud, 
'T was I that gave thee thy renown; 
Thou hadst in the forgotten crowd 
Of common beauties lived unknown, 
Had not my verse exhaled thy name, 
And with it impt the wings of fame." 

What wonder that, under such conditions 
and with such reminders, a passion for be- 
ing be-rhymed seized upon all women, from 
the highest to the lowest, from the marchion- 
ess at court to the orange-girl smiling in the 
theatre ! — a passion which ended its flutter- 
ing existence in our great-grandmothers' al- 
bums. Yet nothing is clearer, when we study 
these poetic suits, than their very discourag- 
ing results. The pleasure that a woman takes 
in being courted publicly in verse is a very 
distinct sensation from the pleasure that she 
expects to take when being courted privately 



58 POINTS OF VIEW. 

in prose. She is quick to revere genius, but 
in her secret soul she seldom loves it. Ge- 
nius, as Hazlitt scornfully remarks, " says such 
things," and the average woman distrusts 
" such things," and wonders why the poet will 
not learn to talk and behave like ordinary peo- 
ple. It hardly needed the crusty shrewdness 
of Christopher North to point out to us the 
arrant ill-success with which the Muse has 
always gone a-wooing. "Making love and 
making love-verses," he explains, " are two of 
the most different things in the world, and I 
doubt if both accomplishments were ever found 
highly united in the same gifted individual. 
Inspiration is of little avail either to gods or 
men in the most interesting affairs of life, 
those of the earth. The pretty maid who 
seems to listen kindly 

' Kisses the cup, and passes it to the rest, ' 

and next morning, perhaps, is off before break- 
fast in a chaise-and-four to Gretna Green, 
with an aid-de-camp of Wellington, as desti- 
tute of imagination as his master." It is the 
cheerful equanimity with which the older poets 
anticipated and endured some such finale as 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 59 

this which gives them their precise advantage 
over their more exacting and self-centred 
successors. 

For what is the distinctive characteristic of 
the early love-songs, and to what do they owe 
their profound and penetrating charm ? It is 
that quality of youth which Heine so subtly 
recognized in Rossini's music, and which, to 
his world-worn ears, made it sweeter than 
more reflective and heavily burdened strains. 
Love was young when Herrick and Carew and 
Suckling went a-wooing; he has grown now 
to man's estate, and the burdens of manhood 
have kept pace with his growing powers. It 
is no longer, as at the feast of Apollo, a con- 
test for the deftest kiss, but a life-and-death 
struggle in that grim arena where passion and 
pain and sorrow contend for mastery. 

* ' Ah ! how sweet it is to love ! 
Ah ! how gay is young desire ! " 

sang Dryden, who, in truth, was neither sweet 
nor gay in his amorous outpourings, but who 
merely echoed the familiar sentiments of his 
youth. That sweetness and gayety of the past 
still linger, indeed, in some half-forgotten and 
wholly neglected verses which we have grown 



60 POINTS OF VIEW. 

too careless or too cultivated to recall. We 
harden our hearts against such delicious tri- 
fling as 

u The young May moon is beaming, love, 
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love." 

We will have none of its pleasant moral, — 

" 'T is never too late for delight, my dear," 

and we will not even listen when Mr. Saints- 
bury tells us with sharp impatience that, in 
turning our backs so coldly upon the poet who 
enraptured our grandfathers, we are losing a 
great deal that we can ill afford to spare. 
The quality of youth is still more distinctly 
discernible in some of Thomas Beddoes's daz- 
zling little songs, stolen straight from the 
heart of the sixteenth century, and lustrous 
with that golden light which set so long ago. 
It is not in spirit only, nor in sentiment, that 
this resemblance exists ; the words, the im- 
agery, the swaying music, the teeming fancies 
of the younger poet, mark him as one strayed 
from another age, and wandering companion - 
less under alien skies. Some two hundred 
years before Beddoes's birth, Drummond of 
Hawthornden, he who sang so tenderly the 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 61 

praises of his sweet mistress, dead on her 
wedding-day, wrote these quaint and pretty 
lines entreating for her favor : — 

11 1 die, dear life, unless to me be given 
As many kisses as the Spring hath flowers, 
Or there be silver drops in Iris' showers, 
Or stars there be in all-embracing" heaven. 
And if displeased, you of the match remain, 
You shall have leave to take them back again." 

In Beddoes's unfinished drama of " Torres- 
mond," we find Veronica's maidens singing her 
to sleep with just such bright conceits and 
soft caressing words, and their song rings 
like an echo from some dim old room where 
Lesbia, or Althea, or Celia lies a-dreaming: — 

" How many times do I love thee, dear ? 
Tell me how many thoughts there be 

In the atmosphere 

Of a new-fall' n year, 
Whose white and sable hours appear 
The latest flake of Eternity : 
So many times do I love thee, dear. 

" How many times do I love again ? 
Tell me how many beads there are 

In a silver chain 

Of evening rain, 
Unraveled from the tumbling main, 
And threading the eye of a yellow star : 
So many times do I love again." 



62 POINTS OF VIEW. 

It is not in this fairy fashion that the truly- 
modern poet declares his passion; it is not 
thus that Wordsworth sings to us of Lucy, 
the most alluring and shadowy figure in 
English poetry, — Lucy, richly dowered with 
a few short verses of unapproachable beauty. 
To the lover of Wordsworth her death is a 
lasting hurt. We cannot endure to think of 
her as he thinks of her, — 

" Rolled round in earth's diurnal course 
With rocks, and stones, and trees." 

We cannot endure that anything so fine 
and rare should slip forever from the sun- 
shine, and that the secret stars should look 
down upon her maidenhood no more. Brown- 
ing, too, who has been termed the poet of love, 
who has revealed to us every changeful mood, 
every stifled secret, every light and shade of 
human emotion, — how has he dealt with his 
engrossing theme ? Beneath his unsparing 
touch, at once burning and subtle, the soul 
lies bare, and its passions rend it like hounds. 
All that is noble, generous, suffering, shame- 
ful, finds in him its ablest exponent. Those 
strange, fantastic sentences in which Mr. Pa- 
ter has analyzed the inscrutable sorcery of 



ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 63 

Mona Lisa, beneath whose weary eyelids " the 
thoughts and experiences of the world lie 
shadowed/' might also fitly portray the image 
of Love, as Browning has unveiled him to our 
sight. He too is older than the rocks, and 
the secrets of the grave and of the deep seas 
are in his keeping. He too expresses all that 
man has come to desire in the ways of a 
thousand years, and his is the beauty " into 
which the soul with its maladies has passed." 
The slumbering centuries lie coiled beneath 
his feet, their hidden meaning is his to grasp, 
their huge and restless impulses have nour- 
ished him, their best results are his inherit- 
ance. But he is not glad, for the maladies of 
the soul have stilled his laughter, and the 
brightness of youth has fled. 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 

So many grateful and impetuous spirits 
have recently come forward to tell to an ap- 
proving world how they have been benefited 
by their early reading, and by their wisely 
chosen favorites in literature, that the trustful 
listener begins to think, against his own rueful 
experience, that all books must be pleasant 
and profitable companions. Those who have 
honored us with confidence in this matter 
seem to have found their letters, as Sir 
Thomas Browne found his religion, " all pure 
profit." Edward E. Hale, for instance, has 
been "helped" by every imaginable writer, 
from Marcus Aurelius to the amiable au- 
thoress of " The Wide, Wide World." Mon- 
cure D. Conway acknowledges his obligations 
to an infinite variety of sources. William 
T. Harris has been happy enough to seize in- 
stinctively upon those works which aroused 
his " latent energies to industry and self-ac- 
tivity ; " and Edward Eggleston has gathered 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 65 

intellectual sustenance from the most unex- 
pected quarters, — the Hollo Books, and Lind- 
ley Murray's Reader. Only Andrew Lang 
and Augustus Jessop are disposed, with an 
untimely levity, to confess that they have read 
for amusement rather than for self-instruction, 
and that they have not found it so easily at- 
tainable. 

Now when a man tells us that he has been 
really " helped " by certain books, we natu- 
rally conclude that the condition reached by 
their assistance is, in some measure, gratify- 
ing to himself; and, by the same token, I 
am disposed to argue that my own unsatis- 
factory development may be the result of less 
discreetly selected reading, — reading for 
which, in many cases, I was wholly irrespon- 
sible. I notice particularly that several per- 
sons who have been helped acknowledge a 
very pleasing debt of gratitude to their early 
spelling-books, to Webster's Elementary, and 
to those modest volumes which first imparted 
to them the mysteries of the alphabet. It was 
not so with me. I learned my letters, at the 
cost of infinite tribulation, out of a horrible 
little book called " Reading Without Tears," 



66 POINTS OF VIEW. 

which I trust has long since been banished 
from all Christian nurseries. It was a brown 
book, and had on its cover a deceptive picture 
of two stout and unclothed Cupids holding 
the volume open between them, and making 
an ostentatious pretense of enjoyment. Young 
as I was, I grew cynical over that title and 
that picture, for the torrents of tears that I 
shed blotted them both daily from my sight. 
It might have been possible for Cupids, who 
needed no wardrobes and sat comfortably on 
clouds, to like such lessons, but for an or- 
dinary little girl in frock and pinafore they 
were simply heart-breaking. Had it only been 
my good fortune to be born twenty years later, 
spelling would have been left out of my early 
discipline, and I should have found congenial 
occupation in sticking pins or punching mys- 
terious bits of clay at a kindergarten. But 
when I was young, the world was still sadly 
unenlightened in these matters ; the plain 
duty of every child was to learn how to read ; 
and the more hopelessly dull I showed my- 
self to be, the more imperative became the 
need of forcing some information into me, — 
information which I received as responsively 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 67 

as does a Strasbourg goose its daily share of 
provender. For two bitter years I had for my 
constant companion that hated reader, which 
began with such isolated statements as " Ann 
has a cat," and ended with a dismal story 
about a little African boy named Sam ; Mr. 
Eider Haggard not having then instructed us 
as to what truly remarkable titles little Afri- 
can boys enjoy. If, to this day, I am disposed 
to underrate the advantages of education, and 
to think but poorly of compulsory school-laws 
and the march of mind, it is because of the 
unhappy nature of my own early experiences. 
Having at last struggled into some acquaint- 
anceship with print, the next book to which 
I can trace a moral downfall is " Sandford 
and Merton," left on the nursery shelves by 
an elder brother, and read many times, not 
because I especially liked it, but because I 
had so little to choose from. Those were not 
days when a glut of juvenile literature had 
produced a corresponding indifference, and 
a spirit of languid hypercriticism. The few 
volumes we possessed, even those of a se- 
verely didactic order, were read and re-read, 
until we knew them well by heart. Now up 



68 POINTS OF VIEW. 

to a certain age I was, as all healthy chil- 
dren are, essentially democratic, with a de- 
cided preference for low company, and a se- 
cret affinity for the least desirable little girls 
in the neighborhood. But " Sandf ord and Mer- 
ton " wrought a pitiable change. I do not 
think I ever went so far as to dislike the Bev. 
Mr. Barlow after the very cordial and hearty 
fashion in which Dickens disliked him, and I 
know I should have been scandalized by Mr. 
Burnand's cheerful mockery ; but, pondering 
over the matter with the stolid gravity of a 
child, I reached some highly unsatisfactory 
conclusions. It did not seem to me then, and 
it does not seem to me now, exactly fair in the 
estimable clergyman to have refused the board 
which Mr. Merton was anxious to pay, and 
then have reproached poor Tommy so coldly 
with eating the bread of dependence ; neither 
did it seem worth while for a wealthy little 
boy to spend his time in doing — very ineffi- 
ciently, I am sure — the work of an under- 
gardener. Harry's contempt for riches, and 
his supreme satisfaction with a piece of bread 
for dinner, struck me as overdrawn ; Tommy's 
mishaps were more numerous than need be, 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 69 

even if he did have the misfortune to be a 
gentleman's son ; and the complacency with 
which Mr. Barlow permitted him to give away 
a whole suit of clothes — clothes which, ac- 
cording to my childish system of ethics, be- 
longed, not to him, but to his mother — - con- 
trasted but poorly with the anxiety manifested 
by the reverend mentor over his own pitiful 
loaf of bread. Altogether, " Sandford and 
Merton " affected me the wrong way ; and for 
the first time my soul revolted from the pre- 
tentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to 
the malign influence of that tale that I owe 
my sneaking preference for the drones and 
butterflies of earth. I do not now believe that 
men are born equal; I do not love universal 
suffrage ; I mistrust all popular agitators, all 
intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, 
all friends of the people and benefactors of 
their race. I cannot even sympathize with 
the noble theory that every man and woman 
should do their share of the world's work ; I 
would gladly shirk my own if I could. And 
this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its 
responsibilities is due to the subtle poison 
instilled into my youthful mind by the too 



70 POINTS OF VIEW. 

strenuous counter-teaching of " Sandford and 
Merton." 

A third pitfall was dug for my unwary- 
feet when, as a school-girl of fifteen, I read, 
sorely against my will, Milton's "Areopagit- 
ica." I believe this is a work highly esteemed 
by critics, and I have even heard people in 
private life, who might say what they pleased 
without scandal, speak quite enthusiastically 
of its manly spirit and sonorous rhetoric. 
Perhaps they had the privilege of reading 
it skippingly to themselves, and not as I 
did, aloud, paragraph after paragraph, each 
weighted with mighty sentences, cumbrous, 
involved, majestic, and, so far as my narrow 
comprehension went, almost unintelligible. 
Never can I forget the aspect of those pages, 
bristling all over with mysterious allusions 
to unknown people and places, and with an 
armed phalanx of Greek and Roman names 
which were presumably familiar to my in- 
structed mind, but which were really dug 
out bodily from my Classical Dictionary, at 
the cost of much time and temper. I have 
counted in one paragraph, and that a moder- 
ately short one, forty-five of these stumbling- 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 71 

blocks, ranging all the way from the "liber- 
tine school of Cyrene," about which I knew 
nothing, to the no less libertine songs of Naso, 
about which I know nothing now. Neither 
was it easy to trace the exact connection be- 
tween the question at issue, " the freedom of 
unlicenc'd printing," and such far-off matters 
as the gods of Egypt and the comedies of Plau- 
tus, Isaiah's prophecies and the Carthaginian 
councils. Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a 
charming thing when held firmly in leash, 
but it is not so attractive when turned loose 
upon a defenseless and unerudite public. 
Lady Harriet Ashburton used to say that, 
when Macaulay talked, she was not only inun- 
dated with learning, but she positively stood 
in the slops. In reading Milton, I waded 
knee-deep, utterly out of my element, and 
deeply resentful of the experience. The lib- 
erty of the press was, to my American notions, 
so much a matter of course, that the only way 
I could account for the continued withholding 
of so commonplace a privilege was by suppos- 
ing that some unwary members of Parliament 
read the " Areopagitica," and were forthwith 
hardened into tyranny forever. I own I felt 



72 POINTS OF VIEW. 

a savage glee in reflecting that Lords and 
Commons had received this oppressive bit of 
literature in the same aggrieved spirit that I 
had myself, and that its immediate result was 
to put incautious patriots in a more ticklish po- 
sition than before. If truth now seems to me 
a sadly overrated virtue ; if plain-speaking is 
sure to affront me ; if the vigorous personali- 
ties of the journalist and the amiable indecen- 
cies of the novel-writer vex my illiberal soul, 
and if the superficial precautions of a paternal 
government appear estimable in my eyes, to 
what can I trace this alien and unprogressive 
attitude, if not to the " Areopagitica," and its 
adverse influence over my rebellious and suf- 
fering girlhood? 

As these youthful reminiscences are of too 
mournful a nature to be profitably prolonged, 
I will add only two more to the list of books 
which have hindered my moral and intellec- 
tual development. When I was seventeen, I 
read, at the earnest solicitation of some well- 
meaning friends, "The Heir of Redclyffe," 
and my carefully guarded theories of life shiv- 
ered and broke before the baneful lesson it 
conveyed. Brought up on a comfortable and 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 73 

wholesome diet of Miss Edgeworth's pleasant 
stories, I had unconsciously absorbed the ge- 
nial doctrine that virtue is its own reward, 
and that additional rewards are sure to be 
forthcoming; that happiness awaits the good 
and affable little girl, and that well-merited 
misfortunes dog the footsteps of her who in- 
clines to evil ways. I trusted implicitly to 
those shadowy mills where the impartial gods 
grind out our just deserts ; and the admirable 
songs in "Patience" about Gentle Jane and 
Teasing Tom inadequately express the rigid- 
ity of my views and the boundless nature of 
my confidence. " The Heir of Redelyffe " de- 
stroyed, at once and forever, this cheerful 
delusion, and with it a powerful stimulus to 
rectitude. Here are Sir Guy Morville and 
poor little Amy, both of them virtuous to a 
degree which would have put Miss Edge- 
worth's most exemplary characters to the 
blush; yet Guy, after being bullied and 
badgered through the greater part of his short 
life, dies of the very fever which should prop- 
erly have carried off Philip ; and Amy, be- 
sides being left widowed and heart-broken, 
gives birth to a daughter instead of a son, 



74 POINTS OF VIEW. 

and so forfeits the inheritance of Redclyffe. 
On the other hand, Philip, the most intoler- 
able of prigs and mischief-makers, whose cruel 
suspicions play havoc with the happiness of 
everybody in the story, and whose obstinate 
folly brings about the final disaster, — Philip, 
who is little better than his cousin's murderer, 
succeeds to the estate, marries that very stilted 
and unpleasant young person, Laura (who is 
after all a world too good for him), and is 
left in a blaze of glory, a wealthy, honored, 
and distinguished man. It is true that Miss 
Yonge, whose conscience must have pricked 
her a little at bringing about this unwarranted 
and, unjustifiable conclusion, would have us 
believe that he was sorry for his misbehavior, 
and that his regret was sufficient to equalize 
the perfidious scales of justice; but even at 
seventeen I was not guileless enough to credit 
the lasting quality of Philip's contrition. A 
very few years would suffice to reconcile him to 
Guy's death, and to convince him that his own 
succession was a mere survival of the fittest, an 
admirable intervention on the part of Destiny 
to remedy her former blunders, and exalt him 
to his proper station in the world. But to 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 75 

me this triumph of guilt meant the downfall 
of my early creed, the destruction of my most 
cherished convictions. Never again might I 
look forward with hopeful heart to the in- 
evitable righting of all wrong things ; never 
again might I trust with old-time confidence 
to the final readjustment of a closing chapter. 
Even Emerson's essay on " Compensation" 
has failed to restore to me the full measure 
of all that I lost through the " The Heir of 
Kedclyffe." 

The last work to injure me seriously as a 
girl, and to root up the good seed sown in 
long years of righteous education, was " Uncle 
Tom's Cabin," which I read from cover to 
cover with the innocent credulity of youth ; 
and, when I had finished, the awful convic- 
tion forced itself upon me that the thirteenth 
amendment was a ghastly error, and that the 
war had been fought in vain. Slavery, which 
had seemed to me before undeviatingly 
wicked, now shone in a new and alluring 
light. All things must be judged by their re- 
sults, and if the result of slavery was to pro- 
duce a race so infinitely superior to common 
humanity ; if it bred strong, capable, self- 



76 POINTS OF VIEW. 

restrained men like George, beautiful, coura- 
geous, tender-hearted women like Eliza, vi- 
sions of innocent loveliness like Emmeline ; 
marvels of acute intelligence like Cassy, chil- 
dren of surpassing precocity and charm like 
little Harry, mothers and wives of patient, 
simple goodness like Aunt Chloe, and, finally, 
models of all known chivalry and virtue like 
Uncle Tom himself, — then slavery was the 
most ennobling institution in the world, and 
we had committed a grievous crime in de- 
grading a whole heroic race to our narrower, 
viler level. It was but too apparent, even to 
my immature mind, that the negroes whom I 
knew, or knew about, were very little better 
than white people ; that they shared in all the 
manifold failings of humanity, and were not 
marked by any higher intelligence than their 
Caucasian neighbors. Even in the matters 
of physical beauty and mechanical ingenuity 
there had plainly been some degeneracy, some 
falling off from the high standard of old slav- 
ery days. Reluctantly I concluded that what 
had seemed so right had all been wrong in- 
deed, and that the only people who stood pre- 
eminent for virtue, intellect, and nobility had 



BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 77 

been destroyed by our rash act, had sunk 
under the enervating influence of freedom to 
a range of lower feeling, to baser aspirations 
and content. It was the greatest shock of 
all, and the last. 

I will pursue the subject no further. Those 
who read these simple statements may not, 
I fear, find them as edifying or as stimulat- 
ing as the happier recollections of more fa- 
vored souls ; but it is barely possible that they 
may see in them the unvarnished reflection of 
some of their own youthful experiences. 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 

There is a delightful little story, very well 
told by Mr. James Payn, the novelist, about 
an unfortunate young woman who for years 
concealed in her bosom the terrible fact that 
she did not think " John Gilpin " funny ; 
and who at last, in an unguarded moment, 
confessed to him her guilty secret, and was 
promptly comforted by the assurance that, for 
his part, he had always found it dull. The 
weight that was lifted from that girl's mind 
made her feel for the first time that she was 
living in an age which tolerates freedom of 
conscience, and in a land where the Holy 
Office is unknown. It is only to be feared 
that her newly acquired liberty inclined her to 
be as much of a Philistine as Mr. Payn him- 
self, and to believe, with him, that all ortho- 
doxy is of necessity hypocritical, and that 
when a man says he admires the "Faerie 
Queene," or " Paradise Lost," or Rabelais, 
the chances are that he knows little or nothing 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 79 

about them. Now, as a matter of fact, it is sel- 
dom safe to judge others too rigidly by our own 
inadequate standards, or to assume that be- 
cause we prefer " InMemoriam " to " Lycidas," 
our friend is merely adopting a tone of griev- 
ous superiority when he modestly but firmly 
asserts his preference for the earlier dirge. It 
is even possible that although we may find 
"Don Quixote" dull, and "The Excursion" 
vapid, another reader, no whit cleverer, we are 
sure, than ourselves, may enjoy them both, with 
honest laughter and with keen delight. There 
is doubtless as much affectation in the world 
of books as in the worlds of art and fashion ; 
but there must always be a certain proportion 
of men and women who, whether by natural 
instinct or acquired grace, derive pleasure 
from the highest ranks of literature, and who 
should in common justice be permitted to say 
so, and to return thanks for the blessings ac- 
corded them. " It is in our power to think 
as we will," says Marcus Aurelius, and it 
should be our further privilege to give unfet- 
tered expression to our thoughts. 

Nevertheless, human nature is weak and 
erring, and the pitfalls dug for us by wily 



80 POINTS OF VIE W. 

critics are baited with the most ensnaring de- 
vices. It is not the great writers of the world 
who have the largest following of sham ad- 
mirers, but rather that handful of choice 
spirits who, we are given to understand, ap- 
peal only to a small and chosen band. Few 
of us find it worth our while to pretend a pas- 
sionate devotion for Shakespeare, or Milton, 
or Dante. On the contrary, nothing is more 
common than to hear people complain that the 
" Inferno " is unpleasant, and " Paradise Lost " 
dreadfully long, neither of which charges is 
easily refutable in terms. But when we read 
in a high-class review that " just as Spenser is 
the poet's poet, so Peacock is the delight of 
critics and of wits ; " or that " George Mere- 
dith, writing as he does for an essentially cul- 
tivated and esoteric audience, has won but a 
limited recognition for his brilliant group of 
novels ; " or that " the subtle and far-reaching 
excellence of Ibsen's dramatic work is a quality 
absolutely undecipherable to the groundlings," 
who can resist tendering his allegiance on the 
spot ? It is not in the heart of man to harden 
itself against the allurements of that magic 
word " esoteric," nor to be indifferent to the 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 81 

distinction it conveys. Mr. Payn, indeed, in 
a robust spirit of contradiction, has left it on 
record that he found " Headlong Hall" and 
" Crotchet Castle " intolerably dull ; but this I 
believe to have been an unblushing falsehood, 
in the case of the latter story, at least. It is 
hardly within the bounds of possibility that a 
man blessed with so keen a sense of humor 
could have found the Rev. Dr. Folliott dull ; 
but it is quite possible that the average reader, 
whose humorous perceptions are of a some- 
what restricted nature, should find Mr. Peacock 
enigmatic, and the oppressive brilliancy of Mr. 
Meredith's novels a heavy load to bear. There 
is such a thing as being intolerably clever, 
and " Evan Harrington " and " The Egoist " 
are fruitful examples of the fact. The mind 
is kept on a perpetual strain, lest some fine 
play of words, some elusive witticism, should 
be disregarded ; the sense of continued effort 
paralyzes enjoyment ; fatigue provokes in us 
an ignoble spirit of contrariety, and we sigh 
perversely for that serene atmosphere of dull- 
ness which in happier moments we affected to 
despise. 

" A man," says Dr. Johnson bluntly, " ought 



82 POINTS OF VIEW. 

to read just as inclination leads him, for what 
he reads as a task will do him little good." 
In other words, if his taste is for Mr. Eider 
Haggard's ingenious tales, it is hardly worth 
his while to pretend that he prefers Tolstoi. 
His more enlightened brother will indeed pass 
him by with a shiver of pained surprise, but 
he has the solid evidence of the booksellers 
to prove that he is not sitting alone in his 
darkness. Yet nowadays the critic diverts 
his heaviest scorn from the guilty author, who 
does not mind it at all, to the sensitive reader, 
who minds it a great deal too much ; and the 
result is that cowardice prompts a not unnat- 
ural deception. Few of us remember what 
Dr. Johnson chanced to say on the subject, 
and fewer still are prepared to solace ourselves 
with his advice ; but when an unsparing dis- 
ciplinarian like Mr. Frederic Harrison lays 
down the law with a chastening hand, we are 
all of us aroused to a speedy and bitter con- 
sciousness of our deficiencies. " The incor- 
rigible habit of reading little books " — a 
habit, one might say, analogous to that of eat- 
ing common food — meets with scant tolerance 
at the hands of this inexorable reformer. Bet- 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 83 

ter, far better, never to read at all, and so 
keep the mind " open and healthy," than be 
betrayed into seeking " desultory information " 
from the rank and file of literature. To 
be simply entertained by a book is an unpar- 
donable sin ; to be gently instructed is very 
little better. In fact, Mr. Harrison carries 
his severity to such a pitch that, on reach- 
ing this humiliating but comforting sentence, 
" Systematic reading, in its true sense, is 
hardly possible for women," it was with a 
feeble gasp of relief that I realized our igno- 
minious exclusion from the race. I do not 
see why systematic reading should be hardly 
possible for women, any more than I see what 
is to become of Mr. Harrison if we are to give 
up little books, but never before did the limi- 
tations of sex appear in so friendly a light. 
There is something frightful in being required 
to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to 
read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and 
Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, 
and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cer- 
vantes, and Moliere, and Swift. One is ir- 
resistibly reminded of Mrs. Blimber surveying 
the infant Paul Dombey. " Like a bee," she 



84 POINTS OF VIEW. 

murmured, " about to plunge into a garden of 
the choicest flowers, and sip the sweets for the 
first time. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, 
Plautus, Cicero. What a world of honey have 
we here ! " And what a limited appetite and 
digestion awaited them ! After all, these great 
men did not invariably love one another, even 
when they had the chance. Goethe, for in- 
stance, hated Dante, and Scott very cordially 
disliked him ; Voltaire had scant sympathy 
with "Paradise Lost," and Wordsworth fo- 
cused his true affection upon the children of 
his own pen. 

It is very amusing to see the position now 
assigned by critics to that arch - offender, 
Charles Lamb, who, himself the idlest of 
readers, had no hesitation in commending the 
same unscrupulous methods to his friends. 
We are told in one breath of his unerring lit- 
erary judgment, and, in the next, are solemnly 
warned against accepting that judgment as 
our own. He is the most quoted, because the 
most quotable of writers, yet every one who 
uses his name seems faintly displeased at hear- 
ing it upon another's lips. I have myself 
been reminded with some sharpness, by a re- 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 85 

viewer, that illustrations drawn from Lamb 
counted for nothing in my argument, because 
his was " a unique personality,' ' a " pure ima- 
gination, which even the drama of the Restora- 
tion could not pollute." But this seems to be 
assuming more than we have any right to as- 
sume. I cannot take it upon myself to say, 
for example, that Mr. Bagehot's mind was 
more susceptible to pollution than Charles 
Lamb's. I am not sufficiently in the secrets 
of Providence to decide upon so intimate and 
delicate a question. But granted that others 
have a clearer light on these matters than I 
have, it would still appear as though the un- 
polluted source were the best irom which to 
draw one's help and inspiration. What really 
makes Lamb a doubtful guide through the 
mazes of literature is the fact that there is not 
a single rule given us in these sober days for 
the proper administration of our faculties 
which he did not take a positive pleasure in 
transgressing. His often-quoted heresy in re- 
gard to those volumes which " no gentleman's 
library should be without " might perhaps be 
spared the serious handling it receives ; but 
his letters abound in passages equally shame- 



86 POINTS OF VIEW. 

less and perverting. " I feel as if I had read 
all the books I want to read," he writes un- 
concernedly ; and again, " I take less pleasure 
in reading than heretofore, but I like books 
about books." And so, alas ! do we ; though 
this is the most serious charge laid at our 
doors, and one which has subjected us to the 
most humiliating reproofs. It is very pleasant 
to have Mr. Ainger tell us what an admirable 
critic Lamb was, and with what unerring cer- 
tainty he pointed out the best lines of Words- 
worth and Southey and Coleridge. The fact 
remains — though to this Mr. Ainger does 
not draw our attention — that he found no- 
thing to praise in Byron, heartily disliked 
Shelley, never, so far as we can see, read 
Keats, condemned Faust unhesitatingly as " a 
disagreeable, canting tale of seduction," and 
discovered strong points of resemblance be- 
tween Southey and Milton. Under these cir- 
cumstances, it is hardly safe to elect him as a 
critical fetich, if we feel the need of such an ar- 
ticle, merely because he admired the " Ancient 
Mariner " and Blake's " Chimney Sweeper," 
and did not particularly admire " We are 
Seven." Even his fine and subtle sympathy 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 87 

with Shakespeare is a thing to be revered and 
envied, rather than analyzed and drawn into 
service, where it will answer little purpose. But 
what is none the less sure is that Lamb recog- 
nized by a swift and delicate intuition the lit- 
erary food that was best fitted to nourish his 
own intellectual growth. This was Sir Wal- 
ter Scott's secret, and this was Lamb's. Both 
knew instinctively what was good for them, 
and a clear perception of our individual needs 
is something vastly different from idle pref- 
erence based on an ignorant conceit. It is 
w r hat we have each of us to learn, if we would 
hope to thrive ; and while we may be aided in 
the effort, yet a general command to read and 
enjoy all great authors seldom affords us the 
precise assistance we require. 

Still less do we derive any real help from 
those more contentious critics who, being 
wedded hard and fast to one particular author 
or to one particular school of thought, refuse, 
with ostentatious continency, to cast lingering 
looks upon any other type of loveliness. Lit- 
erary monogamy, as practiced by some of our 
contemporaries, makes us sigh for the old ge- 
nial days of Priest Martin, when the tyranny 



88 POINTS OF VIEW. 

of opinions had not yet grown into a binding 
yoke, and when it was still possible to follow 
the example of Montaigne's old woman, and 
light one candle to Saint Michael and another 
to the Dragon. At present, the saint — or 
perhaps the dragon — stands in a blaze of 
glory, all the more lustrous for the dark 
shadow thrown on his antagonist. "Praise 
handed in by disparagement," the Greek drama 
whipped upon the back of Genesis, — if I 
may venture to quote Charles Lamb again — 
this is the modern method of procedure, a 
method successfully inaugurated by Macaulay, 
who could find no better way of eulogizing 
Addison than by heaping antithetical re- 
proaches upon Steele. In a little volume of 
lectures upon Russian literature, lectures 
which were sufficiently popular to bear both 
printing and delivery, I find the art of per- 
suasiveness illustrated by this firebrand of a 
sentence, hurled like an anathema at the heads 
of a peaceful and unoffending community : 
" Read Tolstoi ! Read humbly, read admir- 
ingly ! Reading him in this spirit shall in 
itself be unto you an education of your highest 
artistic nature. And when your souls have 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 89 

become able to be thrilled to their very depths 
by the unspeakable beauty of Tolstoi's art, 
you will then learn to be ashamed of the 
thought that for years you sensible folks of 
Boston have been capable of allowing the Ste- 
vensons with their Hydes, and the Haggards 
with their Shes, and even the clumsy Wards 
with their ponderous Elsmeres, to steal away, 
under the flag of literature, your thoughtful 
moments." 

Now, apart from the delightful vagueness of 
perspective, — for " Robert Elsmere " and 
" She " grouping themselves amicably together 
is a spectacle too pleasant to be lost, — I can- 
not but think that there is something oppres- 
sive about the form in which these comments 
are offered to the world. It reminds one of 
that highly dramatic scene in Bulwer's " Riche- 
lieu," where the aged cardinal hurls " the curse 
of Rome " at a whole stageful of people, who 
shrink and cower without knowing very dis- 
tinctly at what. Why should critics, I won- 
der, always adopt this stringent and defiant 
tone when they would beguile us to the enjoy- 
ment of Russian fiction ? Why should the 
reading of Tolstoi necessarily imply a con- 



90 POINTS OF VIEW. 

tempt for Robert Louis Stevenson? Why, 
when we have been " thrilled to our very 
depths " by " Peace and War " or " Anna 
Karenina," should we not devote a few spare 
moments to the consideration of " Markheim," 
a story whose solemn intensity of purpose in 
no way mars its absolute and artistic beauty ? 
And why, above all, should we be petulantly 
reprimanded, like so many stupid and obsti- 
nate children ? I cannot even think that Mr. 
Ho wells is justified in calling the English 
nation " those poor islanders," as if they 
were dancing naked somewhere in the South 
Seas, merely because they love George Eliot 
and Thackeray as well as Jane Austen. 
They love Jane Austen too. We all love 
her right heartily, but we have no need to em- 
ulate good Queen Anne, who, as Swift ob- 
served, had not a sufficient stock of amity for 
more than one person at a time. We may 
not, indeed, be prepared to say with Mr. 
Howells that Miss Austen is " the first and 
the last of the English novelists to treat mate- 
rial with entire truthfulness," having some 
reasonable doubts as to the precise definition 
of truth. We may not care to emphasize our 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 91 

affection for her by repudiating with one 
breath all her great successors. We may not 
even consider " The Newcomes " and " Henry 
Esmond" as illustrating the degeneracy of 
modern fiction ; yet nevertheless we may en- 
joy some fair half-hours in the company of 
Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Elton, of Cath- 
erine Morland and Elizabeth Bennet. Only, 
when we are searching for a shibboleth by 
which to test our neighbor's intellectual worth, 
let not Jane Austen's be the name, lest we be 
rewarded for our trouble by hearing the faint, 
clear ripple of her amused laughter — that 
gentle, feminine, merciless laughter — echoing 
softly from the dwelling-place of the immortals. 
It is inevitable, moreover, that too much 
rigidity on the part of teachers should be fol- 
lowed by a brisk spirit of insubordination 
on the part of the taught. Accordingly, now 
and then, some belligerent freeman rushes 
into print, and shakes our souls by declaring 
breathlessly that he hates " Wagner, and Mr. 
Irving, and the Elgin Marbles, and Goethe, 
and Leonardo da Vinci ; " and this rank 
socialism in literature and art receives a very 
solid and shameless support from the more 



92 POINTS OF VIEW. 

light-minded writers of the day. Mr. Birrell, 
for instance, fails to see why the man who 
liked Montgomery's poetry should have been 
driven away from it by Macaulay's stormy 
rhetoric, nor why Macanlay himself could not 
have let poor Montgomery alone, nor why 
" some cowardly fellow " should join in the 
common laugh at Tupper, when he knows 
very well that in his secret soul he much pre- 
fers the " Proverbial Philosophy " to " Ata- 
lanta in Calydon " or " Empedocles on Etna." 
A recent contributor to Macmillan assures us, 
with discouraging candor, that it is all vanity 
to educate ourselves into admiring Turner, 
and that it is not worth while to try and 
like the " Mahabharata " or the " Origin of 
Species," if we really enjoy "King Solomon's 
Mines " or the " Licensed Victualler's Ga- 
zette." On the other hand, we have Ruskin's 
word for it that unless we love Turner with 
our whole hearts we shall not be — artistically 
speaking — saved ; and hosts of strenuous crit- 
ics in the field of letters are each and every 
one assuring us that there is no intellectual 
future for the world unless we speedily ten- 
der our allegiance wherever he says it is due. 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 93 

Poet-censors, like Mr. Swinburne, whose words 
are bitterness and whose charity is small, lay 
crooked yokes upon our galled necks. Even 
the story-tellers have now turned reviewers on 
their own account, and gravely tell us how 
many novels, besides their own, we should feel 
ourselves at liberty to read. 

Under these circumstances, it is hardly a 
matter of surprise that people whose minds 
are, as Mr. Bagehot termed it, " to let " stand 
hesitating between license and servitude. On 
the one side, we hear men — intelligent men, 
too — boasting that they never read anything 
but the newspapers, and seeming to take a 
perverted pride in their own melancholy 
deprivation. On the other, we see both men 
and women, and sometimes even children, 
practicing a curious sort of literary asceticism, 
and devoting themselves conscientiously and 
very conspicuously to the authors they least 
enjoy. These martyrs to an advanced culti- 
vation find their self-imposed tasks, I am 
happy to think, grow harder year by year. 
Helen Pendennis, occasionally reading Shake- 
speare, " whom she pretended to like, but 
did n't," had comparatively an easy time of 



94 POINTS OF VIEW. 

it; but her successor to-day who goes to a 
lecture on Hegel or Euripides when she w T ould 
prefer cards and conversation ; who sits, per- 
plexed and doubtful, through a performance 
of "A Doll's House" when " Little Lord 
Faun tier oy" represents her dramatic prefer- 
ence ; who tries to read Matthew Arnold and 
Tourgueneff, and now and then Mr. Pater, 
when she really enjoys Owen Meredith, 
and " Booties' Baby," and the Duchess, 
pays a heavy price for her enviable reputation. 
" The true value of souls is in proportion to 
what they can admire," says Marius the 
Epicurean ; but the true value of our friends' 
distinction is in proportion to the books we 
behold in their hands. We have hardly yet 
outgrown the critical methods of the little 
heroine of " Mademoiselle Panache," who 
knows that Lady Augusta is accomplished 
because she has seen her music and heard of 
her drawings ; and, as few of us resemble 
the late Mr. Mark Pattison in his unwilling- 
ness to create a good impression, we naturally 
make an effort to be taken at our best. Mr. 
Payn once said that Macaulay had frightened 
thousands into pretending they knew authors 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 95 

with whom they had not even a bowing ac- 
quaintance ; and though the days of his au- 
tocracy are over, it has been succeeded by 
a more fastidious and stringent legislation. 
We no longer feel it incumbent upon us to 
profess an intimacy with Thucydides, nor to 
retere the "Pilgrim's Progress." Indeed, a 
recent critic has been found brave enough to 
speak harsh words concerning the Delectable 
Mountains and the Valley of Humiliation, — 
words that would have frozen the current of 
Macaulay's blood, and startled even the tol- 
erant Sainte-Beuve, weary as he confessed 
himself of the Pilgrim's vaunted perfections. 
But there is always a little assortment of 
literary shibboleths, whose names we con over 
with careful glibness, that we may assert our 
intimacy in hours of peril; nor should we, 
in justice, be censured very severely for doing 
what is too often with us, as with the Ephra- 
imites, a deed of simple self-defense. 

These passwords of culture, although their 
functions remain always the same, vary 
greatly with each succeeding generation ; 
and, as they make room in turn for one an- 
other, they give to the true and modest lovers 



96 POINTS OF VIEW. 

of an author a chance to enjoy him in peace. 
Wordsworth is now, for example, the cher- 
ished friend of a tranquil and happy band, 
who read him placidly in green meadows or 
by their own firesides, and forbear to trouble 
themselves about the obstinate blindness of 
the disaffected. But there was a time when 
battles royal were fought over his fame, owing 
principally, if not altogether, to the insulting 
pretensions of his followers. It was then con- 
sidered a correct and seemly thing to vaunt 
his peculiar merits, as if they reflected a shad- 
owy grandeur upon all who praised them, 
very much in the spirit of the little Austra- 
lian boy who said to Mr. Froude, " Don't 
you think the harbor of Sydney does us great 
credit ? " To which the historian's characteris- 
tic reply was, " It does, my dear, if you made 
it." Apart from the prolonged and point- 
less discussion of Wordsworth's admirable 
moral qualities, " as though he had been the 
candidate for a bishopric," there was always 
a delicately implied claim on the part of his 
worshipers that they possessed finer percep- 
tions than their neighbors, that they were in 
some incomprehensible way open to influences 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 97 

which revealed nothing to less subtle and dis- 
criminating souls. The same tone of heart- 
felt superiority is noticeable among the very 
ardent admirers of Robert Browning, who 
seem to be perpetually offering thanks to 
Heaven that they are not as other men, and 
who evince a gentle but humiliating contempt 
for their uninitiated fellow-creatures ; while 
Ibsen's fervent devotees dwell on the moun- 
tain tops apart. How many people, I wonder, 
who believe that they have loved Shelley all 
their lives, find themselves exceedingly dazed 
and harassed by what Mr. Freeman calls " the 
snares of Shelley ana," a mist of confusing 
chatter and distorted praise ! How many un- 
ambitious readers, who would fain enjoy their 
Shakespeare quietly, are pursued even to their 
peaceful chimney-corners by the perfidious 
devices of commentators and of cranks! In 
the mean while, an experienced few ally them- 
selves, with supreme but transient enthusiasm, 
to Frederic Mistral or to Pushkin, to Omar 
Khayyam or to Amiel ; and an inexperienced 
many strive falteringly to believe that they 
were acquainted with the Rubaiyat before the 
date of Mr. Vedder's illustrations, and that 



98 POINTS OF VIEW. 

the diary of a half-Germanized Frenchman, 
submerged in a speculative and singularly 
cheerless philosophy, represents the intellec- 
tual food for which their souls are craving. 

The object of criticism, it has been said, is 
to supply the world with a basis, a definition 
which cannot be accused of lacking sufficient 
liberality and breadth. Yet, after applying 
the principle for a good many years, it is dis- 
couraging to note that what has really been 
afforded us is less a basis than a battlefield, 
the din and tumult from which strike a dis- 
cordant note in our lives. That somewhat 
contemptuous severity with which critics ad- 
dress the general public, and which the gen- 
eral public very stoutly resents, is urbanity 
itself when compared with the language which 
they feel themselves privileged to use to one 
another. Senor Armando Palacio Valdes, for 
example, who has been recently presented to 
us as a clear beacon-light to guide our wan- 
dering steps, has no hesitation in saying that 
" among the vulgar, of course" he includes 
" the greater part of those who write literary 
criticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, 
since they teach what they do not know." 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 99 

But this is the kind of thing that is very easy 
to say, and carries no especial weight when 
said. The "of course" adds, indeed, a faint 
flavor of unconscious humor to the enviable 
complacency of the whole, and there is always 
a certain satisfaction to a generous soul in the 
sight of a fellow-mortal so thoroughly enjoy- 
ing the altitude to which he believes he has 
risen. 

" Let us sit on the thrones 
In a purple sublimity, 
And grind down men's bones 
To a pale unanimity,' J 

sings Mrs. Browning in one of her less lumi- 
nous moments; and Senor Valcl^s and his 
friends respond with alacrity, " We will ! " 
Unhappily, however, " the greater part of 
those who write literary criticism," while per- 
haps no more vulgar than their neighbors, are 
not generous enough nor humorous enough to 
appreciate the delicate irony of the situation. 
They rush forward to protest with energetic 
ill temper, and the air is dark with warfare. 
Alas for those who succeed, as Montaigne ob- 
served, in giving to their harmless opinions a 
fatal air of importance ! Alas for those who 



100 POINTS OF VIEW. 

tilt with irrational chivalry at all that man 
holds dear ! How many years have passed 
since Saint-Evremond uttered his cynical pro- 
test against the unprofitable wisdom of re- 
formers ; and to-day, when one half the world 
devotes itself strenuously to the correction and 
improvement of the other half, what is the 
result, save pretense, and contention, and a 
dismal consciousness of insecurity ! fMore 
and more do we sigh for greater harmony and 
repose in the intellectual life ; more and more 
do we respect the tranquil sobriety of that 
wise old worldling, Lord Chesterfield, who 
counsels every man to think as he pleases, or 
rather as he can, but to forbear to disclose his 
valuable ideas when they are of a kind to dis- 
turb the peace of society. 

In reading the recently published letters of 
Edward Fitzgerald, we cannot fail to be struck 
with the amount of unmixed pleasure he de- 
rived from his books, merely because he ap- 
proached them with such instinctive honesty 
and singleness of purpose. He was perfectly 
frank in his satisfaction, and he was wholly 
innocent of any didactic tendency. Those 
subjects which he confessed he enjoyed be- 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 101 

cause lie only partly understood them, " just 
as the old women love sermons," he refrained 
from interpreting to his friends ; those " large, 
still books," like " Clarissa Harlowe," for 
which he shared all Tennyson's enthusiasm, he 
forbore to urge upon less leisurely readers. 
And what a world of meaning in that single 
line, ^ For human delight, Shakespeare, Cer- 
vantes, and Scott " ! For human delight ! 
The words sound like a caress ; a whole sunny 
vista opens before us ; idleness and pleasure 
lure us gently on ; a warm and mellow at- 
mosphere surrounds us ; we are invited, not 
driven, to be happy. I cannot but compare 
Fitzgerald reading Scott, " for human de- 
light," in the quiet winter evenings, with a 
very charming old gentleman whom I recently 
saw working conscientiously — so I thought — 
through Tolstoi's " Peace and War." He 
sighed a little when he spoke to me, and held 
up the book for inspection. " My daughter- 
in-law sent it to me," he explained resignedly, 
" and said I must be sure and read it. But," 
— this with a sudden sense of gratitude and 
deliverance, — " thank Heaven ! one volume 
was lost on the way." Now we have Mr. An- 



102 POINTS OF VIEW. 

drew Lang's word for it that the Englishmen 
of to-day, " those poor islanders," indeed, are 
better acquainted with " Anna Karenina " than 
with " The Fortunes of Nigel," and we cannot 
well doubt the assertion, in view of the too man- 
ifest regret with which it is uttered. But then 
nobody reads " The Fortunes of Nigel " because 
he has been told to read it, nor because his 
neighbors are reading it, nor because he wants 
to say that he has read it. The hundred and 
one excellent reasons for becoming acquainted 
with Tolstoi or Ibsen resolve themselves into 
, a single motive when we turn to Scott. It is 
" for human delight " or nothing. And if, 
even to children, this joy has grown somewhat 
tasteless of late years, I fear the reason lies in 
their lack of healthy unconsciousness. They 
are taught so much they did not use to know 
about the correct standing of authors, they 
are so elaborately directed in their recreations 
as well as in their studies, that the old simple 
charm of self-forgetful absorption in a book 
seems well-nigh lost to them. It is not very 
encouraging to see a bright little girl of ten 
making believe she enjoys Miss Austen's 
novels, and to hear her mother's complacent 



/ 



LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 103 

comments thereon, when we realize how ex- 
clusively the fine, thin perfection of Miss Aus- 
ten's work appeals to the mature observation 
of men and women, and how utterly out of har- 
mony it must be with the crude judgment and 
expansive ideality of a child. I am willing 
to believe that these abnormally clever little 
people, who read grown-up books so conspicu- 
ously in public, love their Shakespeares, and 
their Grecian histories, and their " Idylls of 
the King." I have seen literature of the del- 
icately elusive order, like " The Marble Faun," 
and " Elsie Venner," and " Lamia," devoured 
with a wistful eagerness that plainly revealed 
the awakened imagination responding with' 
quick delight to the sweet and subtle charm of 
mystery. But I am impelled to doubt the 
attractiveness of Thackeray to the youthful 
mind, even when I have just been assured that 
" Henry Esmond " is " a lovely story ; " and I 
am still more skeptical as to Miss Austen's 
marvelous hair-strokes conveying any meaning 
at all to the untrained faculties of a child. 
Can it be that our boys and girls have learned 
from Emerson and Carlyle not to wish to be 
amused ? - Or is genuine amusement so rare 



104 POINTS OF VIEW. 

that, like Mr. Payn's young friend, they have 
grown reconciled to a pretended sensation, and 
strive dutifully to make the most of it? Alas ! 
such pretenses are not always the facile things 
they seem, and if a book is ever to become 
a friend to either young or old, it must be 
treated with that simple integrity on which all 
lasting amity is built. "Read, not to con- 
tradict and confute," says Lord Bacon, " nor 
to believe and take for granted, nor to find 
talk and discourse ; " and, in the delicate 
irony of this advice, we discern the satisfac- 
tion of the philosopher in having deprived the 
mass of mankind of the only motives which 
prompt them to read at all. 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 

One of the most curious and depressing 
things about our modern literary criticism is 
the tendency it has to slide into an ethical 
criticism before we know what to expect. 
We go to a Browning Society, for example, — 
at least some of us who are stout-hearted 
go, — presumably to hear about Mr. Brown- 
ing's poetry. What we do hear about are his 
ethics. Insinuate a doubt as to the artistic set- 
ting of a poem, and you are met at once by the 
spirited counter-statement that the poet has 
taught us a particularly noble lesson in that 
particularly noble verse. Push your heresy a 
step further by hinting that the question at 
issue is not so much the nobility of the lesson 
taught as the degree of beauty which has been 
made manifest in the teaching, and you find 
yourself in much the same position as that 
unfortunate Epicurean who strayed wantonly 
into the lecture-hall of Epictetus, and got phi- 
losophically crushed for his presumption. The 



106 POINTS OF VIEW. 

fiction of the day, a commonplace product for 
the most part, which surely merits lighter treat- 
ment at our hands, is subjected to a similar 
discipline ; and the novelist, finding his own 
importance immensely increased thereby, rises 
promptly to the emergency, and, with charac- 
teristic diffidence, consents to be our guide, 
philosopher, and friend. It is amusing to hear 
Bishoj3 Copleston, writing for that young and 
vivacious generation who knew not the seri- 
ousness of life, remind them pointedly that 
"the task of pleasing is at all times easier 
than that of instructing." It is delightful 
to think that there ever was a period when 
people preferred to be pleased rather than 
instructed. It is refreshing to go back in 
spirit to those halcyon days when poets 
sang of their ladies' eyebrows rather than of 
the inscrutable problems of fate, and when 
Mrs. Battle relaxed herself, after a game of 
whist, over that genial and unostentatious 
trifle called a novel. Fancy Mrs. Battle re- 
laxing herself to-day over " Daniel Deronda," 
or " The Ordeal of Richard Feveril," or " The 
Story of an African Farm " ! 

Vernon Lee, speaking by the mouth of 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 107 

Marcel, that shadowy young Frenchman who 
is none the less unpleasant for being so indis- 
tinct, would have us believe that this incor- 
rigible habit of applying ethical standpoints 
to artistic questions is merely an English idio- 
syncrasy, one of those " weird and exquisite 
moral impressions" which can be gathered 
only from contact with British soil. But in 
view of the deductions recently drawn from 
French and Russian fiction by an ingenious 
American critic, we are forced to conclude 
that true didacticism is an exotic of such rare 
and subtle excellence as frequently to be mis- 
taken for vice. In fact, it is not its least 
advantageous peculiarity that a novelist may, 
on high moral grounds, treat of a great many 
subjects which he would be compelled rigor- 
ously to let alone, if he had no nobler object 
before him than the mere pleasure and en- 
tertainment of his readers. There are no 
improper novels any longer, because even 
those that strike the uninitiated as admirably 
adapted to the spiritual requirements of Corn- 
modus or Elagabalus are, in truth, far more 
moral than morality itself, being set up, like 
the festering heads of old-time criminals, as a 



108 POINTS OF VIEW. 

stern warning in the market-place. Zola, we 
all know, aspires as much to be a teacher as 
George Eliot. His methods are different, 
to be sure, but the directing principle is the 
same. He can neither amuse nor please, but 
he can and will instruct. " When I have once 
shown you," he seems to say, " every known 
detail of every known sin, — and the list, it 
must be confessed, is a long one, — you will 
then be glad to walk purely on your appointed 
path. You will remember what I have de- 
scribed to you, and be cautious." But it may 
fairly be doubted whether the Spartan boys, 
whose anxious fathers exhibited to them the 
drunken Helots sprawling swine-like in the 
sun, were quite as deeply shocked at the 
sight as classical history would give us to 
understand. There are some old-fashioned 
lines by an old-fashioned poet to the effect 
that the ugliness of Vice is no especial det- 
riment to her seductions, if we will only look 
at her often enough to forget it. Probably 
those Spartan lads, after a few educational 
experiments, began to think that the Helots, 
in their reeking filth and bestiality, were 
rather interesting studies; were experiencing 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 109 

new and perhaps pleasurable emotions ; were 
more comfortable, at all events, than they 
themselves, sitting stiff and upright at the 
public table, with a scanty plateful of unpalat- 
able broth ; were, in short, having a jolly good 
time of it, — and why not try for once what 
such thorough-going drunkenness was like ? 

This point of view, however, is far too shal- 
low and frivolous to find favor with the seri- 
ous apostles who are regenerating the world 
by the simple process of calling old and evil 
things by new and beautiful names. In the 
days of our great-grandfathers, a novel was 
simply a novel. Ten chances to one it was 
not as virtuous as it should have been, in 
which case the great-grandfathers laughed 
over it jovially, if they chanced to be light- 
minded, or shook their heads impressively, 
if they were disposed to be grave; perhaps 
even going so far as to lock it up, having 
previously satisfied their own curiosity, from 
their equally curious families. But it never 
occurred to them to make a merit of reading 
" Tom Jones " or " Humphry Clinker," any 

more than it occurred to the authors of those 

« 

ingenious books to pose as illustrative moral- 



110 POINTS OF VIEW. 

ists before the world. The men of that ro- 
bust generation were better able to bear the 
theory of their amusements, and vices were 
quite content to flourish shamelessly under 
their proper names. Cruelty then took the 
form of pastime, — bear-baiting, badger-draw- 
ing, cock-fighting ; questionable pleasures, 
doubtless, yet gentle as the sports of cherubs 
when compared with the ever-increasing ago- 
nies of vivisection, with the ceaseless and 
nameless experiments of German and Italian 
scientists, the " Fisiologia del Dolore " of Pro- 
fessor Mantegazza, all of which horrors are 
justified and turned into painful duties by our 
new evolutionary morality. Sensuality, too, 
which used to show itself coarse, smiling, un- 
masked, and unmistakable, is now serious, 
analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its 
responsibilities that it passes muster half the 
time as a new type of asceticism. The moral 
animus with which Frenchmen write immoral 
books is one of the paradoxes of our present 
system of ethics ; and it occasionally happens 
that the simple-minded reader, failing to ap- 
preciate the shadowy elevation of their plat- 
form, fancies they are working con amore 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. Ill 

amid their unpromising and unsavory ma- 
terials. So it was that Mr. Howells startled 
a great many respectable people by the as- 
surance that "Madame Bovary" was "one 
impassioned cry of the austerest morality," 
when they had innocently supposed it to be 
something vastly different. Even respectable 
critics, unemancipated English critics in par- 
ticular, seem to have been somewhat taken 
back by the breadth of this definition. Per- 
haps they recalled Epictetus, — " Austerity 
should be both cleanly and pleasing," — and 
considered that "Madame Bovary "was nei- 
ther. Perhaps they thought, and with some 
reason, that never, since Swift's angry eyes 
were closed in death, has any writer expressed 
more harsh and cruel scorn for his fellow-men 
than Gustave Flaubert, and that concentrated 
contempt is seldom the most effective weapon 
for an apostle. Perhaps they were merely 
conventional enough to fancy that a novel, 
against which even wicked Paris protested, 
was hardly decorous enough for sober Lon- 
don. At all events, it would appear as though 
a goodly number of stragglers along the path 
of virtue felt themselves insufficiently advanced 



112 POINTS OF VIEW. 

for such a difficult and abstruse text-book of 
ethics. 

In the midst of this universal disclaimer, 
it never seems to occur to anybody to ask the 
simple question, Why should " Madame Bo- 
vary " be an impassioned cry of the austerest 
morality, — why should any novel undertake 
to be an impassioned cry of morality at all ? 
It is not the office of a novelist to show us how 
to behave ourselves ; it is not the business of 
fiction to teach us anything. Scientific truths, 
new forms of religion, the humorous eccentri- 
cities of socialism, the countless fads of radical 
reformers, the proper way to live our own 
lives, — these matters, which are now objects 
of such tender regard to the story-teller, form 
no part of his rightful stock-in-trade. His 
task is simply to give us pleasure, and his 
duty is to give it within the not very Puritan- 
ical limits prescribed by our modern notions 
of decency. If he chooses to overstep these 
limits, an offense against propriety, it is exas- 
perating to have him defended on the score of 
an ethical purpose, an offense against art ; for 
there is nothing so hopelessly inartistic as to 
represent the world as worse than it is, or to 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 113 

express a too vehement dissatisfaction with the 
men who dwell in it. Art is never didactic, 
does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to 
grapple with theories, and is killed outright by 
a sermon. Its knowledge is not that of a 
schoolmaster, and is not imparted through the 
severe medium of lessons. It assumes no re- 
sponsibilities, undertakes no reformation, and, 
as George Sand neatly points out, proves no- 
thing. What are we to learn, she asks, from 
" Paul and Virginia " ? Merely that youth, 
friendship, love, and the tropics are beautiful 
things when St. Pierre describes them. What 
from " Faust ? " Only that science, human 
life, fantastic images, profound, graceful, or 
terrible ideas, are wonderful things when Goe- 
the makes out of them a sublime and moving 
picture. This sounds like high authority for 
Mr. Oscar Wilde's latest and most amusing 
heresy, that Nature gains her true distinction 
from being reproduced, with necessary modifi- 
cations, by Art ; that too close a copy of the 
original is fatal to the perfection of the younger 
and fairer sister ; that the insignificant and 
sordid types in which Nature takes such repre- 
hensible delight are to be, if possible, forgot- 



114 POINTS OF VIEW. 

ten, rather than dandled into insulting promi- 
nence; and that not all the dreary vices of 
the most drearily vicious man or woman whom 
Zola ever drew can give that man or woman 
a right to breathe in the tranquil air of fiction, 
As for accepting inartistic and repellent sin- 
ners for the sake of the moral lesson which 
may, or may not, be drawn from their sin, Mr. 
Wilde is as prompt as De Quincey himself to 
repudiate any such utilitarian theory. "If 
you insist on my telling you what is the moral 
of the Iliad," says De Quincey, " I must insist 
on your telling me what is the moral of a rat- 
tlesnake, or the moral of Niagara. I suppose 
the moral is, that you must get out of their 
way if you mean to moralize much longer." 

But this light-hearted flippancy on the part 
of the critic was only possible, or at least was 
only acceptable, in those days when the nov- 
elist had not yet awakened to his serious 
duties in life. Content, for the most part, to 
tell a story, he barely remembered now and 
then, in the beginning, may be, or at the end, 
that there was such a thing as an ethical 
purpose in existence. Even Richardson, the 
father of English didactic fiction, was but an 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 115 

indifferent parent, starting out with a great 
many gallant promises on behalf of his off- 
spring, and easily forgetting all about them. 
Miss Burney was as cheerfully unconscious of 
her own grave obligations to society as was 
Miss Austen ; while in those few lines with 
which Sir Walter Scott closes " The Heart 
of Mid - Lothian " — lines addressed to the 
" reader," and containing some irrefutable but 
not very original remarks about the happiness 
of virtue and the infelicity of vice — we see an 
almost pathetic avowal on the part of the great 
novelist that, in the mere delight of telling his 
beautiful and best loved tale, he had well- 
nigh lost sight of any moral lesson it might 
be fitted to convey, and was trying at the last 
moment to make amends for this deficiency. 
Imagine George Eliot forgetting, or permit- 
ting her readers to forget, the moral lesson of 
" Adam Bede," when every fresh development 
of character or of narrative has for its con- 
scious purpose the driving home of hard and 
bitter truths. No need for the authoress of 
" Romola " to wind up her story with that 
paragraph of excellent advice to poor little 
Lillo, who is after all rather young to profit 



116 POINTS OF VIEW. 

by it ; while we who have followed Tito from 
his first joyous entrance into Florence to that 
last dreadful moment when, Abating, bruised, 
beautiful, and helpless, down the Arno, he 
opens his dying eyes to meet the horror of 
Baldassarre's vengeance, — we surely do not 
require to be warned afresh against the unpar- 
donable sin of making things easy for our- 
selves. In the pathetic history of the marred 
and broken lives of " Middlemarch," in the 
darker and harsher tragedy of " Daniel De- 
ronda," we see forever present upon each suc- 
ceeding page the underlying motive of the 
tale ; we hear George Eliot listening, as Mor- 
ley says, to the sound of her own voice, and 
announcing as distinctly as she announced in 
life that her function is that of the aesthetic 
teacher, to rouse the nobler emotions which 
make mankind desire the social right. 

If the test of the true artist be to conceal 
his art, then this transparently didactic pur- 
pose is fatal to the perfection of any work 
claiming to spring from the imagination. It 
is impossible to preach a sermon out of the 
mouth of fiction without making the fiction 
subordinate to the sermon, and thus at once 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 117 

destroying the just proportions of a story, and 
forfeiting that subtle sympathy with life, as it 
is, which gives to every artistic masterpiece its 
admirable air of self-sufficing and harmonious 
repose. " I always tremble when I see a 
philosophical idea attached to a novel," said 
Sainte-Beuve, who was spared by the kindly 
hand of death from the sight of countless 
novels attached to philosophical ideas. Charles 
Lamb, with that unerring intuition which was 
the most wonderful thing about his indolent 
luminous genius, recognized, even in the com- 
parative sunlight of his day, the growing 
shadow of a speculative, disciplinal, analytic 
literature which should sadly overrate its own 
responsibilities and importance. " We turn 
away," he said, " from the real essences of 
things to hunt after their relative shadows, 
moral duties ; whereas, if the truth of things 
were fairly represented, the relative duties 
might be safely trusted to themselves, and 
moral philosophy lose the name of a science." 
No one understood more thoroughly than 
Lamb that the purely natural point of view, 
as apart from the purely ethical point of view, 
supplies the proper basis for all imaginative 



118 POINTS OF VIEW. 

writing. " I have lived to grow into an in- 
decent character," he sighed, struggling with 
whimsical dejection to comprehend the new 
forces at work ; sometimes protesting angrily 
against the " Puritanical obtuseness, the stupid, 
infantile goodness which is creeping among 
us, instead of the vigorous passions and vir- 
tues clad in flesh and blood ; " sometimes con- 
templating, with humorously lowered eyelids, 
" the least little men who spend their time and 
lose their wits in chasing nimble and retiring 
Truth, to the extreme perturbation and drying 
up of the moistures." 

" On court, helas ! apr&s la v^rite* ; 
Ah ! croyez-moi, l'erreur a son m^rite." 

But if modern novelists are disposed to sacri- 
fice their art to a conscious ethical purpose, 
to write fiction, as Mr. Oscar Wilde wittily 
says, " as though it were a painful duty," it 
can hardly be denied that they are giving the 
public what the public craves ; that they are 
on the safe side of criticism, and have chosen 
their position wisely, if not well. Should any 
one feel inclined to doubt this, it might be 
a convincing and salutary exercise to re-read 
as swiftly as possible a few of the numerous 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 119 

essays and reviews which followed closely on 
George Eliot's death, and which have not 
altogether vanished from the literary market 
now. With one or two distinct and admi- 
rable exceptions, they deal almost exclusively 
with the didactic aspect of her novels ; they 
weigh and balance every social theory, every 
spiritual problem, every moral lesson, to be 
extracted from her pages ; they take her as 
seriously as she took herself, and give their 
keenest praise to those precise qualities which 
marred the artistic perfection of her work. I 
have myself counted the obnoxious word " eth- 
ics " six times repeated in the opening para- 
graph of one review, and have felt too deeply 
disheartened by such an outset to penetrate 
any further. On the other hand, her dra- 
matic power, her subtle insight, her masterly 
style, her warm and vivid pictures of a life 
that has touched us so closely, the exquisite 
art with which her earlier tales are con- 
structed, and, above and beyond all, her 
delicious and inimitable humor, — these things 
appear to be regarded as mere minor details, 
useful perhaps and pleasing, but strictly sub- 
ordinate to the nobler endowments of her 



120 POINTS OF VIEW. 

spirit. That some of us endure George Eliot 
the teacher for the sake of George Eliot the 
story-teller is a truth too painful to be put 
often into words. That little Maggie Tulliver 
spelling out the examples in the Latin gram- 
mar, and secretly delighted at her own amaz- 
ing cleverness, enables some of us to support 
the processional virtues of Romola, and the 
deadly priggishness of Daniel Deronda, is a 
melancholy fact which perhaps it would be 
wiser to ignore. Maggie, as we are aware, 
has deeply shocked the sensitive nature of Mr. 
Swinburne by her grossness in falling in love 
with Stephen, for no better reason, appar- 
ently, than because he was the first big, and 
strong, and handsome man she had ever 
known. That wonderful scene on the boat, 
with its commonplace setting and strained in- 
tensity of emotion ; the short, sad, rapturous 
flight; the few misty hours of passionate 
dreaming which made poor Maggie's little 
share of earthly happiness, have branded her 
so deeply in the sight of this hardened moral- 
ist that even her bitter agony of renunciation 
and her final triumph have failed to win 
her pardon. With what chastened severity 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 121 

and with what an animated vocabulary he 
condemns the " revolting avowal " of her love, 
the "hideous transformation," the " vulgar 
and brutal outrage/* the " radical and moral 
plague spot," which debases her into something 
too vile for pity or redemption ! Verily, this 
is the squeamishness of the true ascetic who 
has somehow mistaken his vocation, and there 
will be a scant allowance of cakes and ale for 
any of us when it is Mr. Swinburne's turn to 
be virtuous. 

As for the humor of George Eliot's novels, 
that mysterious humor which she herself was 
not humorous enough to appreciate, it de- 
serves better treatment at our hands, were 
it only for the sake of its valuable adapta- 
bility, were it only because it is pliant enough 
to lit in all the time with our own duller 
imaginings, and to afford a basis and an il- 
lustration for our own inadequate thoughts. 
From what depths of her sombre nature came 
those arrow - points tipped with fire, or, 
choicer still, those tempered shafts of re- 
flective ridicule, which are kindly enough to 
win our unhesitating acquiescence ? With 
what pleasure we are reminded that " people 



122 POINTS OF VIEW. 

who live at a distance are naturally less faulty 
than those immediately under our own eyes, 
and it seems superfluous, when we consider 
the geographical position of the Ethiopians, 
and how very little the Greeks had to do with 
them, to inquire further why Homer calls 
them ' blameless ' " ! Surely, to express a truth 
humorously is to rob that truth of all offen- 
sive qualities, and Lucian himself would be 
prepared to admit that, in a case like this, it 
is almost as pleasant as falsehood. But to 
beguile us into the grateful shades of fiction, 
as Jael beguiled Sisera into the shelter of her 
tent, and then, with deadly purpose, to trans- 
fix us with a truth as sharp and cruel as the 
nail with which Jael slew her guest, is a das- 
tardly betrayal of confidence. When a nov- 
elist undertakes to sit in judgment upon his 
characters, for the sake of illustrating some 
moral lesson with which he has no need to 
concern himself^ he rudely breaks the mystic 
web of illusion, and destroys the charm which 
binds us to his side. What is it that gives to 
" Henry Esmond " its supreme artistic value, 
if not the fact that Thackeray sank himself 
out of sight ; was content for once to look at 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 123 

things with Esmond's gentle eyes, to judge of 
things with Esmond's tolerant soul ; and for- 
bore to whip his actors through the play like 
criminals at the cart - tail ? On the other 
hand, what whimsical sense of responsibility 
induced Bulwer to elaborate a character like 
Randal Leslie, only to make of him an educa- 
tional sign-post, after the approved fashion of 
Miss Edgeworth's " Early Lessons " ? Judged 
by a purely ethical standard, Randal no doubt 
merited his failure ; judged by the standard 
of his ability and energy, Reynard the Fox was 
as little likely to fail ; and though Mr. Froude 
tells us that " women, with their clear moral 
insight, have no sympathy with Reynard's 
successful villainy," yet I doubt whether we 
should really like to see him outwitted by a 
fool like Bruin, or beaten by a bully like Ise- 
grim. He is a terrible scamp, to be sure, but 
the charm of the situation is that we are not 
compelled to watch it from a jury-box. 

Now the disadvantage of being at once a 
novelist and a teacher is that you have no 
neutral ground from which to observe your 
characters, no friendly appreciation of things 
or people as you find them. What the ar- 



124 POINTS OF VIEW. 

tist accepts with delicate sympathy, though 
with no pretense at justification, the moralist 
must either justify or condemn. The first 
course is common enough, and produces a 
class of literature essentially vicious because 
of its very limitations, — six deadly sins held 
up to public execration, and the seventh pre- 
sented to us tenderly as an ill-understood and 
sadly calumniated virtue. The second course 
— that of implied condemnation — is equally 
open to a Sunday-school story or to the least 
decorous of French novels ; both have for 
their avowed object the pillorying of vice, and 
both put forward this claim as a reasonable 
excuse for existence. But art has no pillory, 
no stocks, no whipping-post, no exclusive 
methods for fixing our attention upon sin. 
Art gives us Lady Macbeth and Iago, and 
gives them to us without reproaches, without 
extenuation, and without any attempt to re- 
form. It is less painful to watch the irresisti- 
ble development of their respective crimes 
than to hear Thackeray lashing with keen 
scorn some poor sinner stumbling through the 
mazes of worldly wickedness, or to see George 
Eliot pursuing one of her own creations 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 125 

with inextinguishable severity and contempt. 
There is something paralyzing in the cold 
anger with which Rosamond Vincy is branded 
and shamed ; there is something appalling in 
the conscientious vindictiveness with which 
Tito is hunted down, step by step, to his final 
retribution. That delightful essayist, Mr. 
Karl Hillebrand, whose artistic nature is 
about as much at home among modern the- 
ories as a strayed Faun in a button factory, 
has given us a half-humorous, half-despairing 
picture of some old acquaintances under the 
new dispensation : of Manon Lescaut threat- 
ened with Charlotte Bronte's birch-rod ; of 
Squire Western opening his startled eyes as 
Zola proceeds to detail for his benefit the 
latest and most highly realistic study of de- 
lirium tremens ; of Falstaff, whom that losel 
Shakespeare treated so indulgently, listening 
abashed to George Eliot's scathing denuncia- 
tions. " For really, Sir John," he hears her 
say, " you have no excuse whatever. If you 
were a poor devil who had never had any 
but bad examples before your eyes ! — but 
you have had all the advantages which des- 
tiny can give to man on his way through life. 



126 POINTS OF VIEW. 

Are you not born of a good family? Have 
you not had at Oxford the best education 
England is able to give to her children ? 
Have you not had the highest connections ? 
And, nevertheless, how low you have fallen ! 
Do you know why ? I have warned my Tito 
over and over again against it : because you 
have always done that only which was agree- 
able to you, and have shunned everything that 
was unpleasant." 

This sounds like sad trifling to our sober 
and orthodox ears, but it is not more auda- 
cious, on the whole, than the pathetic lamenta- 
tions of Mr. Oscar Wilde over the career of 
Charles Reade : the most disheartening, he 
protests, in all literature ; " wasted in a fool- 
ish attempt to be modern, and to draw atten- 
tion to the state of our convict prisons, and 
the management of private lunatic asylums. 
Charles Dickens was depressing enough, in all 
conscience, when he tried to arouse our sympa- 
thy for the victims of the poor-law administra- 
tion ; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, 
a man with a true sense of beauty, raging 
and roaring over the abuses of modern life 
like a common pamphleteer or a sensational 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 127 

journalist, is really a sight for the angels to 
weep over." It is just possible that whatever 
personal interest the angelic hosts take in our 
earthly lot may be directed to philanthropy 
rather than to literature ; but, for the idle and 
inglorious mortal, the protest holds a world of 
truth and meaning. Keade, as a reformer, is 
melancholy company ; and Dickens is inex- 
pressibly dismal when he drags the Chancery 
business into " Bleak House," and the pauper 
dinner-table into " Oliver Twist," and that 
dreary caricature, the Circumlocution Office, 
into " Little Dorrit." If these things really ac- 
complished the good that is claimed for them, 
it was dearly bought by the weariness of so 
many millions of readers. " A fiction contrived 
to support an opinion is a vicious composition," 
said Jeffrey, who was as apt in his general crit- 
icisms as he was awkward in their particular 
applications, and who lived before the era of 
serious and educational novels. To-day we 
have the unhesitating assertion of Mr. How- 
ells that one of Tolstoi' 's highest claims to our 
consideration is his steadfast teaching "that 
all war, private and public, is a sin." Mr. 
Kuskin, it may be remembered, holds some- 



128 POINTS OF VIEW. 

what different views : " There is no great art 
possible to a nation but that which is based 
on war." Yet as every man is entitled to his 
own opinion in such matters, there is no reason 
why we should quarrel with either the Russian 
or the Englishman for their chosen principles. 
But Ruskin is no greater as an essayist be- 
cause he approves of war, and Tolstoi gains 
nothing as a novelist because he adheres to 
peace. The glory of the battlefield, its pathos 
and its horror, are all fitting subjects for the 
artist's pen or pencil. He may stir our blood 
and rouse our fighting instincts, like Homer or 
Scott ; or he may move us to pity, and sorrow, 
and shame, by the revelation of all the shat- 
tered hopes and bitter agonies that lie beyond. 
But his own greatness depends exclusively on 
his treatment of the subject, and not on his 
point of view. Who knows and who cares 
what De Neuville thinks of war ? He paints 
for us a handful of men roused at dawn, and 
rushing gallantly to their deaths, and we feel 
our hearts beat high as we look at them. The 
terror, the awf ulness, the self-forgetting cour- 
age, the gay defiance of battle, all are there, 
imprisoned mysteriously in the artistic group- 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 129 

ing of a few blue-coated soldiers. But Vere- 
stchagin, who aspires to teach us the wicked- 
ness of war, is powerless to thrill us in this 
manner. He is probably sincere in his opinions, 
and he has striven hard to give them form and 
expression, but, lacking the artistic impulse, 
he has for the most part striven in vain. His 
huge canvases, packed with dead and dying, 
are less impressive, less solemn, less painful 
even, from their monotonous overcrowding, 
than a single Zouave, whose wounds De Neu- 
ville has no need to emphasize with vast ex- 
penditure of vermilion, when the faintness of 
a mortal agony draws his weary body to the 
earth. " All real power," says Euskin, " lies 
in delicacy." To trouble the senses is an easy 
task, but it is through the imagination only 
that we receive any strong and lasting impres- 
sions, and no sincerity of purpose can suffice 
to turn a crude didacticism into art. 

It is hard to analyze the peculiar nature of 
the claims asserted and upheld by the disciples 
of modern realism. They are not content 
with the splendid position which is theirs by 
right, — not content with the admirable work 
they have done, and the hold they have se- 



130 POINTS OF VIEW. 

cured on the sympathies of our earnest, ration- 
alistic, and unimaginative age ; but they as- 
sume in some subtle and incomprehensible 
way that their school is based upon man's 
love and appreciation for his fellow-creatures. 
If we would but look upon all men as our 
brothers, it is plainly hinted, all men would be 
of equal interest to us, and it is our duty, as 
nineteenth-century citizens, to accept and cher- 
ish this universal relationship. To the perpet- 
ual sounding of the humanitarian note, there 
are some, it is true, who answer, with Vernon 
Lee's very amusing and very wicked skeptic, 
that " the new-fangled bore called mankind is 
as great a plague as the old-fashioned nuisance 
called a soul ; " but there are others who, find- 
ing themselves in full possession of a con- 
science, stoutly maintain that they love their 
undistinguished brother none the less because 
they weary of his society in literature and art. 
It was Ruskin, for example, who sneered at 
George Eliot's characters as the " sweepings of 
a Pentonville omnibus," — a terrible misap- 
plication of an inspired phrase; but Ruskin 
is the last man in Christendom who can be 
accused of an indifference to his fellow-men. 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 131 

His whole life is a sufficient refutation of the 
charge. Voltaire is responsible for the state- 
ment that the world is full of people who are 
not worth knowing. Yet Voltaire was for- 
ever restlessly espousing some popular cause, 
forever interesting himself in the supposed 
welfare of these eminently undesirable associ- 
ates. What he thought, and what he was quite 
right in thinking, is that we gain nothing, intel- 
lectually or spiritually, from the mass of men 
and women with whom we come in contact ; 
and that it is wiser to fix our attention upon 
graceful and exalted types than to go on for- 
ever, as Charles Lamb expressed it, " encour- 
aging each other in mediocrity." 

The present stand of realism, however, is but 
one more phase of the intrusion of ethics upon 
art, — the assumption that I cannot have a sin- 
cere regard for the welfare of my washerwo- 
man if I do not care for her company either 
in a book or out of it. Tubs have grown in 
favor since the day when Wordsworth was 
compelled, u in deference to the opinion of 
friends," to substitute an impossible turtle- 
shell for the homely vessel in which the blind 
Highland boy set sail on Loch Leven. All* 



132 POINTS OF VIEW. 

classes and all people, I am now given to un- 
derstand, are of supreme interest to the loving 
student of human nature, and it is a " narrow 
conservatism " — chilling phrase — that seeks 
to limit the artist's field of action. But as 
limiting the artist's field of action is practically 
impossible, and not often essayed, it is hard to 
understand what the respective schools of fic- 
tion find to fight over, and why this new battle 
of the books should be raging as fiercely as if 
there were any visible cause of war. It is not 
an orderly and well-appointed battle, either, 
confined to the ranks of critics and reviewers, 
but a free skirmish, where everybody who has 
written a novel rushes in and plays an active 
part. Conflicting opinions rattle around our 
heads like hail, and the voice of the peace- 
maker, — Mr. Andrew Lang, — protesting that 
all schools are equally good, if the scholars 
are equal to their tasks, is lost in the univer- 
sal clamor. The only point on which any two 
sharpshooters appear to agree is in laying the 
blame for the " unmanly timidity of English 
fiction " — a timidity not always so apparent 
as it might be — on the shoulders of women, 
who, it seems, will have all novels modeled to 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 133 

suit themselves, and who, with the arrogance 
of supreme power, have reversed the political 
situation, and deprived mankind of their vote. 
This is the opinion of Rider Haggard, and also 
of Vernon Lee, who asserts that " the ethics 
of fiction are framed entirely for the benefit 
or the detriment of women," and that its en- 
forced morality — a defect which, to do her 
justice, she is striving her best to eradicate — 
is fatal to its mission in life. 

But that fiction has a mission, nobody dares 
to doubt ; that its ethics are of paramount im- 
portance, nobody dares to deny. It devotes 
itself in all seriousness to our moral and intel- 
lectual welfare ; and if, now and then, we are 
reminded of Sydney Smith, who would rather 
Mr. Perceval had whipped his boys and saved 
his country, we stifle the sinful impulse, and 
turn to biography and history for recreation, 
for that purely imaginative element which 
places no tax upon our conscience or credu- 
lity. Yet we may at least remember that 
all natures do not develop on the same lines ; 
that all goodness is not comprised within 
certain recognized virtues, or limited to cer- 
tain fields of thought. Tolstoi', a figure on a 



134 POINTS OF VIEW. 

grand scale, " filled with pity for the oppressed, 
the poor, and the lowly," has manifested the 
sincerity of his creed by a life of hard work 
and hearty renunciation. But Sir Walter 
Scott, the Tory, the "feudalist," content to 
take the world as he found it, and to believe 
that whatever is, is right, proved himself no 
less the friend and benefactor of his kind. 
The halo round his head is not that of genius 
only, but of love, — love freely given and abun- 
dantly returned. The anxious whisper of the 
London workmen to Allan Cunningham, " Do 
you know, sir, if this is the street where he is 
lying?" the rapturous cry of the little de- 
formed tailor who, with his last breath, sobbed 
out, " The Lord bless and reward you ! " and, 
falling back, expired, — these are the sounds 
that ring through generations to bear witness 
to man's fidelity to man. 

" For the might 
Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes," 

sang Wordsworth, with whom affectionate hy- 
perbole was hardly a common fault. It can- 
not be that Mr. Howells believes in his heart 
that American children need to be warned 
against Sir Walter's errors, and that it is the 



FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 135 

duty of American parents to give this solemn 
warning. Consider that it is only in youth 
that our imagination triumphs vividly over re- 
alities, — a triumph short-lived enough, but 
rich in fruits for the future. The time comes 
all too soon when we doubt, and question, 
and make room in our puzzled minds for 
the opinions of many men. Ah, leave to the 
child, at least, his clear, intuitive, unbiased en- 
joyment, his sympathy with things that have 
been ! He is not so easily hurt as we sup- 
pose ; he is strong in his elastic ignorance, and 
has no need of a pepsin pill with every mouth- 
ful of literary food he swallows. Mental hy- 
giene, it is said, is apt to lead to mental vale- 
tudinarianism ; but if we are to turn our very 
nurseries into hot-beds of prigs, we may say 
once more what was said when Chapelain pub- 
lished his portentous epic, that " a new horror 
has been added to the accomplishment of 
reading." 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 

It is an interesting circumstance in the 
lives of those persons who are called either 
heretics or reformers, according to the mental 
attitudes or antecedent prejudices of their 
critics, that they always begin by hinting their 
views with equal modesty and moderation. 
It is only when rubbed sore by friction, when 
hard driven and half spent, that they ven- 
ture into the open, and define their positions 
before the world in all their bald malignity. 
Now I have a certain sneaking sympathy, not 
with heretics or reformers, either, but with 
that frame of mind which compels a hunted 
and harried creature suddenly to assume the 
offensive, cast prudence to the winds, nail his 
thesis conspicuously to the doorpost, and 
snortingly await developments. He is not, 
while so occupied, a winning or beautiful 
figure, when judged by the strict standards 
of sweetness and light; but he is eminently 
human, and is entitled to the forbearance of 
humanity. 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 187 

It is now over a year since, in an article 
called " Fiction in the Pulpit," and published 
in the " Atlantic Monthly," I ventured to say, 
or rather I said without any consciousness of 
being venturesome, that the sole business of 
a novel-writer was to give us pleasure; his 
sole duty was to give it to us within decent 
and prescribed limits. It seemed to me then 
that the assertion was so self-evident as to be 
hardly worth the making ; it was a little like 
saying an undisputed thing " in such a solemn 
way." I have learned since how profoundly 
I was mistaken in the temper, not of writers 
only, but of readers as well, — how far re- 
mote I stood from the current of ethical 
activity. It is needless to state that this later 
knowledge has been brought to me by the 
mouths of critics : sometimes by professional 
critics, who said their say in print ; sometimes 
by amateur and neighborly critics, who ex- 
pressed theirs frankly in speech. It is need- 
less, also, to state that, of the two, the pro- 
fessional critics — brothers and sisters of my 
own household I count them — have been 
infinitely more tolerant of my shortcomings, 
more lenient in their remonstrances, more per- 



138 POINTS OF VIEW. 

suasive and even flattering in their lines of 
argument. The ordinary reviewer, anony- 
mous or otherwise, is not the ruthless de- 
stroyer, " ferocious, dishonest, butcherly," 
whom Mr. Howells so graphically portrays, 
but rather a kindly, indifferent sort of crea- 
ture, who cares so little what you think that 
even his reproaches wear an air of gentle and 
friendly unconcern. 

In all cases, however, the verdict reached 
was practically the same. The business of 
fiction is to elevate our moral tone ; to teach 
us the stern lessons of life ; to quicken our 
conceptions of duty ; to show us the dark 
abysses of fallen nature ; to broaden our 
spiritual vistas ; to destroy our old comfort- 
able creeds ; to open our half -closed eyes ; to 
expand our souls with the generous senti- 
ments of humanity; to vex us with social 
problems and psychological conundrums ; to 
gird us with chain armor for our daily bat- 
tles ; to do anything or everything, in short, 
except simply give us pleasure. It is not 
forbidden us, to be sure, to take delight, if 
we can, in the system of instruction ; a good 
child, we are told, should always love its les- 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 139 

sons; but the really important thing is to 
study and know them by heart. Verily 

" This rugged virtue makes me gasp" ! 

Why should the "word " pleasure," when used 
in connection with literature, send a cold 
chill down our strenuous nineteenth-century 
spines? It is a good and charming word, 
caressing in sound and softly exhilarating in 
sense. As in a dream, it shows us swiftly 
rich minutes by a winter firelight, with " The 
Eve of St. Agnes " held in our happy hands ; 
long, lazy summer afternoons spent right joy- 
ously in company with Emma Woodhouse and 
Mr. Knightley ; or, perhaps, hours of content, 
lost; in the letters of Charles Lamb, dear to 
us alike in all seasons and in all moods, a 
heritage of delight as long as life shall last. 
I do not, indeed, as I have been accused of 
doing, employ the word " pleasure " as synony- 
mous with amusement. Amusement is merely 
one side of pleasure, but a very excellent 
side, against which, in truth, I have no evil 
word to urge. The gods forbid such base and 
savorless ingratitude ! This is not at best a 
merry world. " There is a certain grief in 



140 POINTS OF VIEW. 

things as they are, in man as he has come to 
be ; " and the background of our lives is a 
steady, undeviating sadness. Who, then, has 
not felt that sudden lifting of the spirits, that 
quick purging of black, melancholy vapors 
from the brain, as wise old Burton would ex- 
press it, when some fine jest appeals irresis- 
tibly to one's sense of humor ! There comes to 
the alert mind at such a moment a distinct 
revelation of contentment ; a conscious thought 
that it is well to be alive, and to hear that 
nimble witticism which has so warmed and 
tickled one's fancy. " Live merrily as thou 
canst," says Burton, " for by honest mirth we 
cure many passions of the mind. A gay com- 
panion is as a wagon to him that is wearied 
by the way." 

If amusement can help us so materially 
in our daily life, which is a daily struggle as 
well, how much more pleasure ! — pleasure 
which is the rightful goal of art, just as know- 
ledge is the rightful goal of science. " Art," 
says Winckelmann, " is the daughter of Plea- 
sure ; " and as Demeter sought for Perse- 
phone with resistless fervor and desire, so 
Pleasure seeks for Art, languishing in sunless 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 141 

gloom, and, having found her, expresses 
through her the joy and beauty of existence, 
and lives again herself in the possession of 
her fair child, while the whole earth bubbles 
into laughter. We cannot separate these two 
without exchanging sunlight for frost and the 
cold, dark winter nights. Mr. E. S. Dallas, 
who, in those charming volumes pleadingly 
entitled " The Gay Science," has made a gal- 
lant fight for pleasure as the end of art, and 
for criticism as the path by which that end 
is reached, shows us very clearly and very 
persuasively that, in all ages and in all na- 
tions, there has been a natural, wholesome, 
outspoken conviction that art exists for plea- 
sure, and, pleasing, instructs as well. There 
is a core of truth, he grants, in the Horatian 
maxim that art may be profitable as well as 
delightful, " since it always holds that wis- 
dom's ways are ways of pleasantness, that en- 
during pleasure comes only out of healthful 
action, and that amusement, as mere amuse- 
ment, is in its own place good if it be but 
innocent. There is profit in art, as there is 
gain in godliness, and policy in an honest life. 
But we are not to pursue art for profit, nor 



142 POINTS OF VIEW. 

godliness for gain, nor honesty because it is 
politic." 

This, then, is the earliest lesson that the 
student of art has to learn : that it exists for 
pleasure, but for a pleasure that may be 
profitable, and that stands in no sort of oppo- 
sition to truth. " Science," says Mr. Dallas, 
" gives us truth without reference to pleasure, 
but immediately and chiefly for the sake of 
knowledge. Art gives us truth without ref- 
erence to knowledge, but immediately and 
mainly for the sake of pleasure." The test 
of science, then, must always be an increase of 
knowledge, of proven and demonstrable facts ; 
the test of art must always be an increase 
of pleasure, of conscious and sentient joy. 
" What is good only because it pleases," says 
Dr. Johnson, " cannot be pronounced good 
until it has been found to please." 

The joy that is born of art is not always a 
simple or easily analyzed emotion. The plea- 
sure we take in looking at the soft, white, 
dimpled Venus of the Capitol is something 
very different from that strange tugging at 
our heart-strings when we first see the sad 
and scornful beauty of the Venus of Milo, or 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 143 

the curious pity with which we watch the 
dejected Cupid of the Vatican hanging his 
lovely head. But with both the Venus of 
Milo and the Vatican Cupid, the sensation of 
pleasure they afford is greater than the sen- 
sation of pain, or pity, or regret. It triumphs 
wholly over our other emotions, and gains 
fullness from the conflict of our thoughts. 
"We feel many things, but we feel pleasure 
most of all, and this is the final test; and the 
final victory of art. In the same manner, the 
mixed emotions with which we listen to music 
resolve themselves ultimately to pleasure in 
that music ; and the mixed emotions with 
which we read poetry resolve themselves ulti- 
mately to pleasure in that poetry. If it were 
otherwise, we should know that the music and 
the poetry had failed in their crucial trial. If 
we did not feel more pleasure than pain in the 
tragedy of " Othello," it would not be a great 
play. That we do feel more pleasure than 
pain, that our pleasure is subtly fed by our 
pain, proves it to be a masterpiece of art. 

There is still another point to urge. While 
art may instruct as well as please, it can nev- 
ertheless be true art without instructing, but 



144 POINTS OF VIEW. 

not without pleasing. The former quality- 
is accidental, the latter essential, to its being. 
" Enjoyment," says Schiller, " may be only a 
subordinate object in life; it is the highest 
in art." We cannot say that " The Eve of 
St. Agnes " teaches us, directly or indirectly, 
anything whatever. The trembling lovers, 
the withered Angela, the revelers, 

" The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,' ' 

the storm without, the fragrant warmth and 
light within, are all equally innocent of moral 
emphasis. Even the Beadsman is not worked 
up, as he might have been, into a didactic 
agent. But every beauty-laden line is rich in 
pleasure, the whole poem is an inheritance 
of delight. I never read it without being re- 
minded afresh of that remonstrance offered 
so gently by Keats to Shelley, — by Keats, 
who was content to be a poet, to Shelley, 
who would also be a reformer : " You will, I 
am sure, forgive me for sincerely remarking 
that you might curb your magnanimity, and 
be more of an artist, and load every rift 
of your subject with ore." Load every rift of 
your subject with ore, — there spoke the man 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 145 

who claimed no more for himself than that 
he had loved " the principle of beauty in all 
things," and to whose hushed and listening 
soul the cry of Shelley's " divine discontent " 
rang jarringly in the stillness of the night. 
If the poetry of Keats, a handful of scattered 
jewels left us by a dying boy, is, as Matthew 
Arnold admits, more solid and complete than 
Shelley's superb and piercing song, to what 
is this due, save that Keats possessed, in ad- 
dition to his poetic gift, the tranquil artist 
soul ; content, as Goethe was content, to 
love the principle of beauty, and to be in 
sympathy with the great living past which 
has nourished, and still nourishes, the living 
present. The passion for reconstructing so- 
ciety, and for distributing pamphlets as a 
first step in the reconstruction, had no part 
in his artistic development. The errors of his 
fellow-mortals touched him lightly ; their su- 
perstitions did not trouble him at all ; their 
civil rights and inherited diseases were not 
matters of daily thought and analysis. But 
what he had to give them he gave unstinted- 
ly, and we to-day are rich in the fullness of 
his gift. "The proper and immediate object 



146 . POINTS OF VIEW. 

of poetry," says Coleridge, " is the commu- 
nication of immediate pleasure ; " and are our 
lives so joyous that this boon may go un- 
recognized and unregarded ? Which is best 
for us in this chilly world, — that which 
pleases, but does not instruct, like " The Eve 
of St. Agnes," or that which instructs, but does 
not please, like Dr. Ibsen's " Ghosts " ? I do 
not say, which is true art? because the rela- 
tive positions of the two authors forbid com- 
parison ; but, judged by the needs of human- 
ity, which is the finer gift to earth ? If, with 
Pliny, we seek an escape from mortality in 
literature, which shall be our choice ? If, with 
Dr. Johnson, we require that a book should 
help us either to enjoy life or to endure it, 
which shall we take for a friend ? 

"Everything that is any way beautiful is 
beautiful in itself, and terminates in itself," 
says Marcus Aurelius ; and the pleasure we 
derive from a possession of beauty has char- 
acteristic completeness and vitality. This 
pleasure is not only, as we are so often told, 
a temporary escape from pain ; it is not a 
negation, a mere cessation of suffering ; it is 
not necessarily preceded by craving or fol- 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 147 

lowed by satiety ; it is emphatically not a mat- 
ter of prospect as Shelley would have us 
believe ; * it is a matter of conscious posses- 
sion. " Vivre, e'est penser et sentir son 
ame ; " and when a happy moment, complete^ 
and rounded as a pearl, falls into the tossing/ 
ocean of life, it is never wholly lost. For our* 
days are made up of moments and our years / 
of days, and every swift realization of a law- 
ful joy is a distinct and lasting gain in our 
onward flight to eternity. 

It seems to me strangely cruel that this 
philosophy of pleasure should be so ruthlessly 
at variance with the ethical criticism of our 
day. If it has come down to us as a gracious 
gift from the most cheerful and not the least 
wholesome of heathens, it has been broadened 
and brightened into fresh comeliness by the 
spirit of Christianity, which is, above all things, 
a spirit of lawful and recognized joy. No- 
thing is more plain to us in the teaching of the 
early Church than that asceticism is for the 
chosen few, and enjoyment, diffused, genial, 
temperate, and pure enjoyment, is for the 

1 " Pain or pleasure, if subtly analyzed, will be found to 
consist entirely in prospect." 



148 POINTS OF VIEW. 

many. " Put on, therefore, gladness that hath 
always favor with God, and is acceptable unto 
him, and delight thyself in it ; for every man 
that is glad doeth the things that are good, 
and thinketh good thoughts, despising grief." 1 
Through all the centuries, rational Christianity 
has still taught us bravely to endure what we 
must, and gratefully to enjoy what we can. 
There is a very charming and sensible letter on 
this point, written by the Abbe Duval to Ma- 
dame de Remusat, who was disposed to re- 
proach herself a little for her own happiness, 
and to think that she had no right to be so 
comfortable and so well content. 

44 You say that you are happy," writes this 
gentlest and wisest of confessors ; 44 why then 
distress yourself ? Your happiness is a proof 
of God's love toward you ; and if in your heart 
you truly love Him, can you refuse to respond 
to the divine benevolence ? . . . Engrave 
upon your conscience this fundamental truth : 
that religion demands order above all things ; 
and that, since the institutions of society have 
been allowed and consecrated, there is encour- 
agement for those duties by which they are 

1 Shepherd of Hermas. 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 149 

maintained. . . . But especially banish from 
your mind the error that our pains alone are ac- 
ceptable to God. A general willingness to bear 
trial is enough. Never fear but life and time 
will bring it. Dispose yourself beforehand to 
resignation, and meanwhile thank God inces- 
santly for the peace which pervades your lot." 
This is something very different from Rus- 
kin's ethics, — from the plain statement that 
we have no right to be happy while our brother 
suffers, no right to put feathers in our own 
child's hat, while somebody else's child goes 
featherless and ragged. But there is a certain 
staying power in the older and simpler doctrine, 
and an admirable truth in the gentle suggestion 
that we need not vex ourselves too deeply with 
the notion of our ultimate freedom from trial. 
jit was not given to Madame de Remusat, any 
more than it is given to us, to ride in untrou- 
bled gladness over a stony world, j All that she 
attained, all that we can hope for, are distinct 
and happy moments, brief intervals from 
pain, or from that rational ennui which is in- 
separable from the conditions of human life. 
But I cannot agree with the long list of philo- 
sophers and critics, from Kant and Schopen- 



150 POINTS OF VIEW. 

hauer down to Mr. Dallas, who have taught 
that these passing moments are negative in 
their character ; that they are hidden from our 
consciousness and elude our scrutiny, — exist- 
ing while we are content simply to enjoy them, 
vanishing, if, like Psyche, we seek to under- 
stand our joy. The trained intelligence grasps 
its pleasures, and recognizes them as such ; not 
after they have fled, and linger only, a golden 
haze, in memory, but alertly, in the present, 
while they still lie warm in the hollow of the 
heart. There is indeed a certain breathless 
and unconscious delight in life itself, which is 
born of our ceaseless struggle to live, a sweet- 
ness of honey snatched from the lion's mouth. 
This delight is common to all men, and is 
probably keenest in those who struggle hardest. 
When society is reorganized on a Utopian 
basis, and nobody has any further need to 
elbow his own way through hardships and dif- 
ficulties, there will be one joy less in the 
world ; and, missing it, many people will real- 
ize that all which made life worth having has 
been softened and improved out of existence. 
They will cease to value, and refuse to possess, 
that which costs them nothing to preserve. 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 151 

This fundamental happiness in life, and in 
the enforced activity by which it is maintained, 
is hidden from our consciousness. We feel 
the hardships, and do not especially feel any 
relish in ceaselessly combating them, though 
the relish is there ; not keen enough for palpa- 
ble felicity, but vital enough to keep the human 
race alive. All other pleasures, however, we 
should train ourselves to enjoy. They flow 
from many sources, and are fitted to many 
moods. They are fed alike by our most secret 
emotions and by our severest toil, by the sim- 
plest thing in nature and by the utmost sub- 
tlety of art. A primrose by a river's brim 
often makes its appeal as vainly as does Ham- 
let, or the Elgin Marbles. What we need is, 
not more cultivation, but a recognized habit 
of enjoyment. There is, I am told, though 
I cannot speak from experience, a very high 
degree of pleasure in successfully working out 
a mathematical problem. Burton confesses 
frankly that his impelling motive, in long 
hours of research, was primarily his own grati- 
fication. " The delight is it I aim at, so great 
pleasure, such sweet content, there is in study." 
I think the most beautiful figure in recent lit- 



152 POINTS OF VIEW. 

erature is Mr. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, 
whose life, regarded from the outside, is but 
a succession of imperfect results, yet who, de- 
serted and dying, counts over with a patient 
and glad heart the joys he has been permitted 
to know. 

" Like a child thinking over the toys it loves, 
one after another, that it may fall asleep so, 
and the sooner forget all about them, he would 
try to fix his mind, as it were impassively, on 
all the persons he had loved in life, — on his 
love for them, dead or living, grateful for his 
love or not, rather than on theirs for him, — 
letting their images pass away again, or rest 
with him, as they would. One after another, 
he suffered those faces and voices to come and 
go, as in some mechanical exercise ; as he 
might have repeated all the verses he knew by 
heart, or like the telling of beads, one by one, 
with many a sleepy nod between whiles." 

Here is a profound truth, delicately and rev- 
erently conveyed. That which is given us for 
our joy is ours as long as life shall last ; not 
passing away with the moment of enjoyment, 
but dwelling with us, and enriching us to the 
end. The memory of a past pleasure, derived 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 153 

from any lawful source, is a part of the plea- 
sure itself, a vital part, which remains in our 
keeping as long as we recognize and cherish it. 
Thus, the pleasure obtained from seeing the 
Venus of Milo or reading " The Eve of St. Ag- 
nes " is not ended when we have left the Louvre 
or closed the book. It becomes a portion of 
our inheritance, a portion of the joy of living ; 
and the statue and the poem have fulfilled their 
allotted purpose in yielding us this delight. 
There is a curious fashion nowadays of criticis- 
ing art and poetry, and even fiction, with scant 
reference to the pleasure for which they exist ; 
yet a rational estimate of these things is hardly 
possible from any other standpoint. Mr. Rus- 
kin, we know, has invented that pleasing nov- 
elty, ethical art-criticism, and, by its means, as 
Mr. Dallas frankly admits, he has made, not 
the criticism only, but the art itself, intelligi- 
ble and palatable to his English readers. It 
would seem as if they hardly held themselves 
justified in enjoying a thing unless there was 
a moral meaning back of it, a moral principle 
involved in their own happiness. This mean- 
ing and this principle Mr. Ruskin has supplied, 
bringing to bear upon his task all the earnest- 



154 POINTS OF VIEW. 

ness and sincerity of his spirit, all the wonder- 
ful charm and beauty of a winning and per- 
suasive eloquence. It is well-nigh impossible 
to withstand his appeals, they are so irresisti- 
bly worded ; and it is only when we have with- 
drawn from his seductive influence, to think a 
little for ourselves, that we realize how much 
of his criticism, as criticism, is valueless, be- 
cause it consists in analyzing motives rather 
than in estimating results. He assumes that 
the first interest in a picture is, what did the 
painter intend ? the second interest is, how did 
he carry out his intention ? whereas the one 
really important and paramount consideration 
in art is workmanship. We have, many of us, 
the artist's soul, but few the artist's fingers. 
It is a pleasant pastime to decipher the men- 
tal attitude of the painter ; it is essential to un- 
derstand the quality and limit of his powers. 

Reading Mr. Ruskin's criticisms on Tinto- 
ret's pictures in the Scuola di S. Rocco — on 
the Annunciation particularly — is very much 
like listening to a paper in a Browning Society. 
Perhaps the poet, perhaps the painter, did mean 
all that. It is manifestly impossible to prove 
they did n't, inasmuch as death has removed 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 155 

them from any chance of interrogation. But 
by what mysterious and exclusive insight have 
Mr. Ruskin and the Browning student found 
it out? The interpretation is not suggested 
as feasible, it is asserted as a fact; though 
precisely how it has been reached we are not 
suffered to know. Many unkind and severe 
things have been said about judicial criticism, 
but Mr. Ruskin' s criticism is not judicial, — 
which infers an application of governing prin- 
ciples ; it is dogmatic, the unhesitating expres- 
sion of a personal sentiment. He shows you 
Giotto's frescoes in the cloister of Santa Maria 
Novella ; he pleads with you very prettily and 
charmingly to admire the Birth of the Virgin ; 
he points out to you with rather puzzling pre- 
cision exactly what the painter intended to im- 
ply by every detail of the work. This is pleas- 
ant enough ; but suppose you don't really care 
about the Birth of the Virgin when you see it ; 
suppose you fail to follow the guiding finger 
that reveals to you its significance and beauty. 
What happens then ? Mr. Ruskin retorts in 
the severest manner, and with a degree of scorn 
that seems hardly warranted by the contin- 
gency : " If you can be pleased with this, you 



156 POINTS OF VIEW. 

can see Florence. But if not, by all means 
amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, 
as long as you like ; you can never see it." 

So Florence with all its loveliness is lost to 
you, unless you can sufficiently sympathize with 
one small fresco. It would be as reasonable 
to say that all English literature is lost to you, 
unless you truly enjoy "Comus; " that all music 
is lost to you, unless you delight in "Parsifal." 
It is the special privilege of ethical criticism 
to take this exclusive and didactic form ; to 
bid you admire a thing, not because it is beau- 
tiful in itself, but because it has a subtle lesson 
to convey, — a lesson of which, it is urbanely 
hinted, you stand particularly in need. On 
precisely the same principle, you are com- 
manded to cleave to Tolstoi, not because he 
has written able novels, but because those 
novels teach a great many things which it is 
desirable you should know and believe ; you 
are bidden to revere George Meredith, not 
because he has given the world some brilliant 
and captivating books, but because these books 
contain a tonic element fitted for your moral 
reconstruction. If you do not sufficiently value 
these admirable lessons, then you are told, in 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 157 

language every whit as contemptuous as Mr. 
Ruskin's, to amuse yourself, by all means, with 
Lever, and Gaboriau, and Jules Verne ; for 
all higher fiction is, like the art of Florence, 
a sealed book to your understanding. 

"Most men," says Mr. Froude, "feel the 
necessity of being on some terms with their con- 
science, at their own expense or at another's ; " 
and one very popular method of balancing their 
score is by exacting from art and literature 
that serious ethical purpose which they hesitate 
to intrude too prominently into their daily lives, 
rightly opining that it gives much less trouble 
in books. So prevalent is this tone in mod- 
ern thought that even a consummate critic like 
Mr. Bagehot is capable of saying, in one of his 
supremely moral moments, that Byron's poems 
" taught nothing, and therefore are forgotten." 
Et tu, Brute ! Such a sentence from such a 
pen makes me realize something of the bitter- 
ness with which the dying Caesar covered up his 
face from his most trusted friend. That Lord 
Byron's poems are forgotten is rather a matter 
of doubt ; that they are given over entirely into 
the hands of " a stray schoolboy " is a hazard- 
ous assertion to make ; but to say that they are 



158 POINTS OF VIEW. 

forgotten because they teach nothing is to strike 
at the very life and soul of poetry. It does 
not exist to teach, but to please ; it can cease 
to exist only when it ceases to give pleasure. 

Perhaps what Mr. Bagehot meant to imply 
is that it would be a difficult task to review 
Byron's poetry after the approved modern 
fashion ; to assign him, as we assign more con- 
templative and analytic poets, a moral raison 
d'etre. Pick up a criticism of Mr. Browning, 
for example, and this is the first thing we see : 
" What was the kernel of Browning's ethical 
teaching, and how does he apply its principles 
to life, religion, art, and love?" 1 It would 
be as manifestly absurd to ask this question 
about Byron as it would be to review Fielding 
from the standpoint adapted for Tolstoi', or to 
discuss Sheridan from the same field of view 
as Ibsen. With the earlier writers it was a 
question of workmanship ; with our present 
favorites it has become a question of ethics. 
Yet when we seek for simple edification, as 
our plain-spoken grandfathers understood the 
word, as many innocent people understand it 
now, the new school seems as remote from fur- 

1 Quarterly Review. 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 159 

nishing it as the old. Browning, Tolstoi, and 
Ibsen have their own methods of dealing with 
sin, and richly suggestive and illustrative 
methods they are. The lessons taught may be 
of a highly desirable kind, but I doubt their 
practical efficacy in our common working lives ; 
and I cannot think this possible efficacy war- 
rants their intrusion into art. Great truths, 
unconsciously revealed and as unconsciously 
absorbed, have been, in all ages, the soul of 
poetry, the subtle life of fiction. These truths, 
always in harmony with the natural world and 
with the vital sympathies of man, were not 
put forward crudely as lessons to be learned, 
but primarily as pleasures to be enjoyed ; 
and through our " sweet content," as Burton 
phrased it, we came into our heritage of know- 
ledge. To-day both poetry and fiction have 
assumed a different and less winning attitude. 
They have grown sensibly didactic, are at 
times almost reproachful in their tone, and, so 
far from striving to yield us pleasure, to in- 
crease our " sweet content " with life, they en- 
deavor, with very tolerable success, to prevent 
our being happy after our own limited fashion. 
Their principal mission is to worry us vaguely 



160 POINTS OF VIEW. 

about our souls or our neighbors' souls, or the 
social order which we did not establish, and the 
painful problems that we cannot solve. Our 
spirits, at all times restless and troubled, re- 
spond with quick alarm to these dismal agita- 
tions ; our serenity is not proof against the 
strain ; our sense of humor is not keen enough 
to cure us with wholesome laughter ; and nine- 
teenth-century cultivation consists in being 
miserable for misery's sake, and in saying 
solemnly to one another at proper intervals, 
" This is the eternal progress of the ages. " 

It was a curious and rather melancholy ex- 
perience, a year ago, to hear the comments of 
those patient women who devoted their after- 
noons to Ibsen readings, and to turning over 
in their minds the new and unprofitable situa- 
tions thus suggested. The discussions that 
followed were invariably ethical, never critical ; 
they had reference always to some moral co- 
nundrum offered by the play, never to the ar- 
tistic or dramatic excellence of the play itself. 
Was Nora Helmer justified, or was she not, in 
abandoning her children with explicit confi- 
dence to the care of Mary Ann? Had Dr. 
Wangel a right, or had he not, to annul his 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 161 

own marriage tie with the primitive simplicity 
of the king of Dahomey? To answer such 
questions as these has become our notion of 
literary recreation, and there is something pa- 
thetically droll in the earnestness with which 
we bend our wits to the task. Indeed, poor 
little Nora's matrimonial infelicities threat- 
ened to become as important in their way as 
those of Catherine of Aragon or Josephine 
Beauharnais, and we talked about them quite 
seriously and with a certain awe. The un- 
flinching manner in which Ibsen has followed 
Sir Thomas Browne's advice, " Strive not to 
beautify thy corruption ! " commends him, nat- 
urally, to that large class of persons who can 
tolerate sin only when it is dismal ; and Bau- 
delaire, praying for a new vice, was jocund 
in comparison with our Norwegian dramatist, 
unwearyingly analyzing the old one. Yet 
what have we gained from the rankness of 
these disclosures, from these horrible studies 
of heredity, these hospital and madhouse 
sketches, these incursions of pathology into the 
realms of art? What shall we ever gain by 
beating down the barriers of reserve which 
civilized communities have thought fit to rear, 



162 POINTS OF VIEW. 

by abandoning that wholesome reticence which 
is the test of self-restraint ? We try so hard 
to be happy, — we have such need, each of his 
little share of happiness ; yet Ibsen, troubling 
the soul more even than he troubles the senses, 
has chosen to employ his God-given genius in 
deliberately lessening our small sum of human 
joy. When shall we cease to worship at such 
dark altars ? When shall we recognize, with 
Goethe, that " all talent is wasted if the sub- 
ject be unsuitable " ? When shall we under- 
stand and believe that "the gladness of a spirit 
is an index of its power " ? 

" To live," says Amiel, " we must conquer 
incessantly, we must have the courage to be 
happy." Enjoyment, then, is not our common 
daily portion, to be stupidly ignored or care- 
lessly cast away. It is something we must 
seek courageously and intelligently, distin- 
guishing the pure sources from which it flows, 
and rightly persuaded that art is true and good 
only when it adds to our delight. For this 
were our poets and dramatists, our painters 
and novelists, sent to us, — to make us lawfully 
happier in a hard world, to help us smilingly 
through the gloom. And can it be they think 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 163 

this mission beneath their august consideration, 
unworthy of their mighty powers ? Why, to 
have given pleasure to one human being is a 
recollection that sweetens life ; and what should 
be the fervor and transport of him to whom it 
has been granted to give pleasure to genera- 
tions, to add materially to the stored-up glad- 
ness of the earth! " Science pales," says Mr. 
Dallas, "age after age is forgotten, and age 
after age has to be freshened ; but the secret 
thinking of humanity, embalmed in art, sur- 
vives, as nothing else in life survives." This 
is our inheritance from the past, — this secret 
thinking of humanity, embalmed in imper- 
ishable beauty, and enduring for our delight. 
The thinking of that idle vicar, Robert Her- 
rick, when he sang, on a fair May morning : — 

" Come, let us go, while we are in our prime, 
And take the harmless folly of the time ! 
We shall gTow old apace, and die 
Before we know our liberty.' ' 

The thinking of Theocritus, who, lying drow- 
sily on the hillside, saw the sacred waters well- 
ing from the cool caverns, and heard the little 
owl cry in the thorn brake, and the yellow bees 
murmur and hum in the soft spicy air : — 



164 POINTS OF VIEW. 

" All breathed the scent of the opulent sum- 
mer, of the season of fruit. Pears and apples 
were rolling at our feet; the tender branches, 
laden with wild plums, were bowed to earth ; 
and the four-year-old pitch seal was loosened 
from the mouth of the wine-jars." 

Here is art attuned to the simplest forms 
of pleasure, yet as lasting as the pyramids, 
— a whispered charm borne down the current 
of years to soothe our fretted souls. But the 
tranquil enjoyment of what is given us to 
enjoy has become a subtle reproach in these 
days of restless disquiet, of morbid and con- 
scious self - scrutiny, when we have forfeited 
our sympathy with the beliefs, the aspirations, 
and the " sweet content " that linked the cen- 
turies together. We are suffering at present 
from a glut of precepts, a surfeit of preceptors, 
and have grown sadly wise, and very much 
cast down in consequence. We lack, as Amiel 
says, the courage to be happy, and glorify our 
discontent into an intellectual barrier, pluming 
ourselves on a seriousness that may not be di- 
verted. But if we will only consent to calm 
our fears, to quiet our scruples, to humble our 
pride, and to take one glad look into the world 



PLEASURE: A HERESY. 165 

of art, we shall see it bathed in the golden sun- 
light of pleasure ; and we shall know very well 
that didacticism, whether masquerading as a 
psychological drama or a socialistic forecast, 
as a Sunday-school story or a deistical novel, 
is no guide to that enchanted land. 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 

It is one of the most delightful things about 
Miss Edgeworth's immortal tales for children 
that the incidents they relate have a knack of 
remaining indelibly fixed in our memories, long 
after we have succeeded in forgetting the more 
severely acquired information of our school- 
days. Why, for instance, do I vex my temper 
and break my finger-nails in a vain effort to 
untie the knotted cord of every bundle that 
comes to the house, save that I have still be- 
fore me the salutary example of that prudent 
little Ben, who so conscientiously and cheer- 
fully devoted himself to unfastening his uncle's 
package ? " You may keep the string for your 
pains," says Mr. Gresham, with pleasing liber- 
ality. "Thank you, sir," replies Ben, with 
more effusion than I think he feels. " What 
an excellent whipcord it is ! " And so, pocket- 
ing his fee, it wins for him, as we all know, the 
prize at Lady Diana Sweepstake's great arch- 
ery contest, while poor Hal forfeits his shot, 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 167 

and loses his hat, and gets covered with mud 
and disgrace, and sprains his little cousin Pat- 
ty's ankle, and all because he has been rash 
enough to cut his piece of cord. Never was 
moral more sternly pointed, not even in the 
case of Miss Jane Taylor's heedless little 
Emily, who will not stoop to pick up a pin, and 
is punished by the loss of a whole day's plea- 
sure, because, owing to some unexplained in- 
tricacy of her toilet, — 

" She could not stir, 
For just a pin to finish her. " 

But was whipcord such a costly article in 
Miss Edgeworth's time, that a small piece of it 
was worth so much trouble and pains ? We 
have Hal's testimony that twice as much could 
have been bought for twopence; and though 
Hal is but a graceless young scamp, who can- 
not be induced to look upon twopence with be- 
coming reverence, and who plainly has a career 
of want and misery before him, yet his word 
on this matter may be accepted as final. At 
the present day, the value of a bit of string 
saved by patient dexterity from the scissors is 
so infinitesimal that the hoarding up of match 
stumps, after the fashion of a certain great 



168 POINTS OF VIEW. 

banker, would really seem the quicker road to 
wealth. But the true gain in these minute 
economies is of a strictly moral nature, and 
serves, when we know we have been extravagant, 
to balance our account with conscience. The : 
least practical of us have some petty thrift 
dear to our hearts, some one direction in which 
we love to scrimp. I have known wealthy men 
who grudged themselves and their families 
nothing that money could buy, yet were made 
perfectly miserable by the amount of gas 
burned nightly in their homes. They roamed 
around with manifest and pitiful uneasiness, 
stealthily turning down a burner here and there, 
whenever they could do so unperceived, dim- 
ming the glories of their glass and gilding, and 
reducing upper halls and familiar stairways 
into very pitfalls for the stumbling of the un- 
wary. The advent of lamps has brought but 
scant solace to these sufferers, for their econ- 
omy is, in fact, much older than the gas itself, 
and flourished exceedingly in the days of wax 
tapers and tallow-dips. We read in the vera- 
cious chronicles of "Cranford" how Miss Matty 
Jenkyns, so thoughtlessly generous in all other 
matters, had for her one pet frugality the hoard- 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 169 

ing of her candles, and by how many intricate 
devices the dear old lady sought to cherish and 
protect these objects of her tender solicitude. 

" They (the candles) were usually brought 
in with tea, but we only burned one at a time. 
As we lived in constant preparation for a 
friend who might come in any moment (but 
who never did), it required some contriv- 
ance to keep them of the same length, ready 
to be lighted, and to look as if we burned two 
always. They took it in turns, and, whatever 
we might be talking about or doing, Miss 
Matty's eyes were habitually fixed upon the 
candle, ready to jump up and extinguish it, 
and to light the other, before they had become 
too uneven in length to be restored to equality 
in the course of the evening." 

This little scene of innocent deception is 
finer, in its way, than the famous newspaper 
paths on which Miss Deborah's guests step 
lightly over her new carpet to their respective 
chairs. We sympathize with Miss Matty's 
anxiety about her tapers because it represents 
one phase of a weakness common to all man- 
kind, and far remote, we trust, from mere 
vulgar parsimony, which, seeking to stint in all 



170 POINTS OF VIEW. 

things, is, by its very nature, incapable of a 
nice spirit of selection. Even the narrator of 
" Cranford," that shadowy, indistinguishable 
Mary Smith, who contrives so cleverly to keep 
her own identity in the background, — even she 
consents to emerge one moment from her chosen 
dimness, and to claim a share in this highly 
discriminating economy. String, she acknow- 
ledges, is her foible. Like the excellent Mr. 
Gresham, she would preserve it from destruc- 
tion at the most liberal expenditure of other 
people's time and trouble. " My pockets," she 
confesses, " get full of little hanks of it, picked 
up and twisted together, ready for uses that 
never come. I am seriously annoyed if any 
one cuts the string of a parcel instead of pa- 
tiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. 
How people can bring themselves to use India- 
rubber rings, which are a sort of deification 
of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot ima- 
gine. To me an India-rubber ring is a pre- 
cious treasure. I have one which is not new ; 
one that I picked up off the floor six years 
ago. I have really tried to use it, but my 
heart failed me, and I could not commit the 
extravagance." 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 171 

It would be a pity to spoil this vivacious 
description by a touch of odious modern real- 
ism, and to hint that an India-rubber ring 
which had knocked about the world for six 
years must have parted with much of its youth- 
ful elasticity, and would be of comparatively 
little use to any one. 

Illustrious examples are not lacking to give 
dignity and weight to these seemingly trivial 
frugalities. The great, and wise, and mean 
Duke of Marlborough, he who held the fate of 
Europe in his hands, and who was, without 
doubt, the first of English-speaking generals, 
did not disdain to bend his mighty mind to the 
contemplation of his candle-ends, or to the 
tender protection of his luggage. Who under- 
stood so well as he how to spend a thousand 
pounds, and save a shilling? When Prince 
Eugene came to a conference in his tent, the 
duke's servant, anxious no doubt for an osten- 
tatious display, had the temerity to light four 
wax tapers in honor of the royal guest, which, 
when Marlborough perceived, he promptly ex- 
tinguished, rating the unlucky attendant with 
such caustic severity that the offense ran little 
likelihood of being soon repeated. While the 



172 POINTS OF VIEW. 

great pile of Blenheim was absorbing countless 
thousands in its slow process of erection, the 
duke walked every morning from the public 
rooms at Bath to his own lodging, thereby 
saving sixpence daily, and affording a shining 
model to those whose favorite economy is cab- 
hire. He walked to the very end, this con- 
sistent old warrior ; walked while the pangs of 
illness were creeping over his disabled frame ; 
and at last, when he could save no more six- 
pences, he died, and left nearly two million 
pounds to be squandered briskly by his heirs. 

His wife, too, the beautiful, brilliant, high- 
tempered Duchess Sarah, was every bit as 
thrifty as her lord. She built the triumphal 
arch of Blenheim at her own expense, and 
wrangled mightily all the while over the price 
of lime, " sevenpence half -penny per bushel, 
when it could be made in the park." She was 
the richest peeress in England, but her keen 
blue eyes, as fiery as Marlborough's own, were 
ever awake to any attempted depredation. 
Her dressmaker, one Mrs. Buda, essayed, not 
knowing with whom she had to deal, to hold 
back from her some yards of cloth ; whereupon 
the duchess borrowed Mrs. Buda's diamond 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 173 

ring "for a pattern," and refused to give it 
up until the stuff was returned. She under- 
stood also the admirable art of utilizing her 
friends, and there is a delighful letter written 
by her to Lord Stair, then minister at France, 
commissioning him to buy her a night-gown, 
or more properly a dressing-gown, " easy and 
warm, with a light silk wadd in it, such as are 
used to come out of bed and gird round, with- 
out any train at all, but very full. 'T is no 
matter what color, except pink or yellow — no 
gold or silver in it; but some pretty striped 
satin or damask, lined with a tafetty of the 
same color." She also desires for her daugh- 
ter, Lady Harriet, then a child of thirteen, " a 
monto and petticoat to go abroad in, no silver 
or gold in it, nor a stuff that is dear, but a 
middling one that may be worn either in win- 
ter or in summer." The canny duchess pru- 
dently adds that she will wait for the things 
until " no one need be troubled with the cus- 
tom-house people," a euphuism worthy of an 
American conscience, and she thanks Lord 
Stair at the same time for sending her " a pair 
of bodyes," which were so well-fitting, and evi- 
dently so cheap, that she will have two more 



174 POINTS OF VIEW. 

pairs of " white tabby from the same taylor." 
Fancy asking a foreign minister to purchase 
one's stays, and wrappers, and little daughter's 
petticoats, and to please wait his opportunity 
to smuggle them in without duty ! 

Yet " Queen Sarah " was capable of sudden 
deeds of generosity that quite take away our 
breath by their magnificence, and so, for the 
matter of that, was another noble termagant, 
Queen Elizabeth, who gave away right royally 
with one hand, even while she held out the 
other for beggarly gratuities. We see her 
heaping riches into Sir Walter Raleigh's lap, 
and managing to get a great deal of it back 
again, when his treasure-laden ships came 
slowly to port. Nay, did she not seize on " a 
waistcoat of carnation colour, curiously em- 
broidered," which the brave navigator, always 
passionately addicted to fine clothes, had 
snatched from some Spanish galleon for the 
adornment of his own handsome figure, and 
which the queen straightway proceeded to 
flaunt as a stomacher before his injured eyes ? 
If we read a list of Elizabeth's New Year gifts, 
we are both astonished and edified by their 
number and variety. Here is Fulke Greville 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 175 

presenting his sovereign with a night-dress ; not 
a wrapper this time, but a genuine night-dress, 
" made of cambric, wrought about the collar 
and sleeves with Spanish work of roses and 
letters, and a night-coif with a forehead-cloth 
of the same work." And here is Mrs. Carre 
offering her majesty an embroidered cambric 
sheet ; and Dr. Bayly, one of the court physi- 
cians, arriving brisk and early with a pot of 
green ginger under his arm ; and Mrs. Amy 
Shelton with six handkerchiefs all edged with 
gold and silver braid ; and Sir Philip Sidney 
with a most beautiful cambric smock, " and a 
suite of ruffs of cut-work, flourished with gold 
and silver, and set with spangles containing 
four ounces of gold." And here, best of all, 
are several gentlemen of rank, who, being un- 
acquainted with the intricacies of the female 
toilet, feel afraid to venture upon smocks, and 
ruffs, and night-dresses, so solve their dilemma 
by plumply handing down ten pounds apiece, 
a practical donation which the virgin monarch 
accepts with all possible alacrity and good-will. 
Elizabeth, moreover, was known to be a 
costly and often a sadly unremunerative guest 
when it pleased her to visit her loyal people. 



176 POINTS OF VIEW. 

There is a letter written by the Earl of Bed- 
ford to Lord Burleigh that is positively pathetic 
in its apprehension of the impending honor. 
" 1 trust truly," says the expectant host, " that 
your lordship will have in remembrance to 
provide and help that her majesty's tarrying 
be not above two nights and a day, for so long 
time do I prepare." As it was one of the 
queen's whims to give scant warning of her 
coming, the unfortunate gentlemen suddenly 
called upon to harbor their sovereign and her 
suite often found themselves at their wits' end 
for food and entertainment ; and not unfre- 
quently it happened that, after days of ruinous 
expenditure, they had the satisfaction of seeing 
their prospects as blighted as their larders. 
Lord Henry Berkely lamenting the loss of his 
good red deer, twenty-seven of which were slain 
in one day — in their owner's absence, be it 
noted — for Elizabeth's diversion, was at least 
a happier man than the luckless young Eook- 
wood of Euston Hall, whom her majesty re- 
quited for his hospitality by cruel insult and im- 
prisonment. Even King John, who has come 
down to us in history as the least profitable of 
royal guests, could not well do worse than this, 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 177 

though his visits, being occasionally of longer 
duration, were just so much harder to be borne. 
In the chronicles of Jocelin of Brakelond, we 
read how once the king came with a large reti- 
nue to the convent of St. Edmundsbury, and 
stayed there for two whole weeks, eating up 
the monk's provisions at a fearful rate, empty- 
ing the cellars of their choicest wines, and 
making, no doubt, what with drunken, swear- 
ing soldiers and insolent court parasites, sad 
riot and confusion within those peaceful walls. 
At last, however, the weary fortnight was over, 
and the guests stood marshaled to depart ; but 
not before his gracious majesty had made 
offering, as guerdon for two weeks' entertain- 
ment, of a silk cloak to cover St. Edmund's 
shrine, which same cloak was promptly bor- 
rowed back again by one of the royal train, 
and the monks beheld it no more. In addition 
to this elusive legacy, which left the shrine as 
bare as it found it, Jocelin records that the 
monarch, ere he rode forth, presented the con- 
vent with the handsome sum of thirteen pence, 
in consideration of a mass being said for his 
soul, which sorely needed all the spiritual ali- 
ment the good monks could furnish it. We 



178 POINTS OF VIEW. 

can fancy Abbot Samson standing at his mon- 
astery door, and regarding those thirteen pence 
very much as the Genoese consul must have re- 
garded the Duke of Kingston's old spectacles, 
which the dowager duchess tendered him in 
return for his hospitality ; or as Commodore 
Barnet regarded the paste emerald ring with 
which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu grace- 
fully acknowledged the valuable services of 
his man-of-war. 

" Lady Mary's avarice seems to have been 
generally credited at the time, though we have 
no proofs of it," says one of her recent biogra- 
phers, who is disposed, and rightly, to put 
scant faith in Walpole's malicious jibes. But 
if the story of the ring be a true one, she can 
hardly be acquitted of amazing thrift, and of 
a still more amazing assurance. It is said that 
the gallant commodore, never doubting the 
worth of her token, was wont to show it with 
some ostentation to his friends, until one of 
them, who knew the lady well, stoutly main- 
tained that if the stone were genuine she would 
never have parted with it, and a closer inspec- 
tion proved the melancholy accuracy of his 
suspicions. As for much of her so-called 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 179 

greed, it was not without solid justification. 
If she drove a hard bargain with Mr. Wortley, 
stipulating most unromantically for her mar- 
riage settlement before she ran away with him, 
be it remembered that upon this auspicious 
occasion she was compelled to act as her own 
guardian ; and if she had an inexplicable fancy 
for wearing her old clothes, the dimity petti- 
coat, and the gray stockings, and the faded 
green brocade riding-jacket which so deeply 
offended Walpole's fastidious eyes, let us deal 
charitably with a fault in which she has but 
few feminine successors. Those were times 
when fashions had not yet learned to change 
with such chameleon-like speed, and people did 
occasionally wear their old clothes with an un- 
blushing effrontery that would be well-nigh 
disgraceful to-day. Silks and satins, laces and 
furbelows, were all of the costliest description, 
and their owners were chary of discarding 
them, or even of lightly exposing them to ruin. 
Emile Souvestre's languid lady, who proves 
the purity of her blood, somewhat after the 
manner of the princess and the rose leaf, by 
supercilious indifference to the fate of her vel- 
vet mantle in a snowstorm, could hardly have 



180 POINTS OF VIEW. 

existed a few hundred years ago. We have in 
Pepys's diary a most amusing record of his dis- 
gust at being over-persuaded by his wife to 
wear his best suit on a certain threatening May 
Day, and how of course it rained, and all their 
pleasure was spoiled. The guilty Eve was 
quite as unfortunate as her husband, for she 
too had gone forth " extraordinary fine in her 
flowered tabby gown," which we are greatly 
relieved to learn a little later was two years 
old, but smartly renovated with brand-new 
lacings. Only fancy being so careful of a 
two-year gown as to begrudge it to the sight 
of court and commoners on May Day ! 

The same frugal spirit extended down to the 
last century, and was of infinite value to the 
self-respecting poor. Artisans had not yet 
found it imperative to dress their wives and 
children in imitation finery, and farmers were 
even less awake to the exigencies of fashion- 
able attire. We read of rural couples placidly 
wearing their wedding clothes into their ad- 
vanced old age, and we are lost in hopeless 
speculation as to how they accommodated their 
spreading proportions to the coats and gowns 
which presumably had fitted the comparative 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 181 

slimness of their youth. With what patient 
ingenuity did the good dames of Miss Mitf ord's 
village, aided occasionally by an itinerant tai- 
loress, turn and return their husbands' cast-off 
clothing, until, from seeming ruin, they had 
evolved sound garments for their growing boys ; 
and with what pardonable pride did the strut- 
ting youngsters exhibit on the village streets 
these baggy specimens of their mothers' skill ! 
Among the innumerable anecdotes told of 
George III., it is said that, strolling once with 
Queen Charlotte in the woods of Windsor, he 
met a little red-cheeked, white-haired lad, who 
proved, on examination, to be the son of one of 
his majesty's beef-eaters. The gracious king, 
always well pleased with children, patted the 
boy's flaxen head, and bade him kneel and kiss 
the queen's hand, but this the sturdy young 
Briton declined flatly to do ; not, be it said, from 
any desire to emulate the examples of Penn and 
Franklin, by illustrating on a minor scale the 
heroic principles of democracy, but solely and 
entirely that he might not spoil his new 
breeches by contact with the grass. So thrifty 
a monarch, says Thackeray, should have hugged 
on the spot a child after his own heart ; and 



182 POINTS OF VIEW. 

even if the royal favor failed to manifest itself 
in precisely this fashion, I make no doubt that 
the beef-eater's wife, who had stitched those 
little breeches with motherly solicitude, found 
ample comfort in such a judicious son. 

Perhaps, indeed, he was a worthy scion of 
the race of Dodsons, with whom it was an 
honorable tradition to preserve their best 
clothes, very much as the inhabitants of Ceylon 
preserved their sacred Bo-trees, by guarding 
them jealously from the desecrating touch of 
man. Who that has ever had the happiness 
of reading " The Mill on the Floss " can for- 
get the dim seclusion of the shrouded room, 
where, far from the madding crowd, reposes in 
dignified seclusion Mrs. Pullet's new bonnet ? 
To go to see it is in itself a pilgrimage ; to try 
it on, a solemn ceremonial ; what, then, must 
have been the profound emotions with which 
it was actually worn ! Little Maggie Tulli- 
ver, watching with breathless interest while it 
is lifted reverently from the shrine, feels op- 
pressed with a sense of mystery, and is childish- 
ly indignant because no one will tell her what it 
means. The Dodsons are all fond of fine rai- 
ment, but not for the mere vulgar pleasure of 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 183 

self -adornment. Less favored families may take 
a coarse delight in exhibiting their clothes, but 
it remains for them to derive a higher grati- 
fication from keeping them unseen. Even a 
third-best front is felt to be much too good for 
a sister's dinner party, while in the matter of 
frocks and trimmings they are as adamant. 
" Other women, if they liked, might have their 
best thread lace in every wash ; but when Mrs. 
Glegg died, it would be found that she had 
better lace laid by in the right-hand drawer of 
her wardrobe in the spotted chamber, than ever 
Mrs. Wooll of St. Ogg's had bought in her life, 
although Mrs. Wooll wore her lace before it was 
paid for." Here, in a humble way, we have 
the same sentiment that thrilled the heart of 
Elizabeth Petrovna, when she gazed at the 
thousand and one gowns hanging up in the 
royal closets, and felt a true womanly satisfac- 
tion in knowing they were there. 

It is in fact a curious and edifying circum- 
stance that the great ones of this earth, if they 
must be held responsible for much of its un- 
warranted luxury, have at the same time af- 
forded us many shining examples, not only of 
that general and indiscriminate parsimony 



184 POINTS OF VIEW. 

which induced old Frederic William, for in- 
stance, to feed his family on pork and cabbage, 
but also of that more refined and esoteric 
species of economy which it is our task to rec- 
ognize and encourage. George III. was frugal 
in all things, but his particular saving appears 
to have been in carpets, for, summer or winter, 
he never permitted these effeminate devices 
upon his bedroom floor. His great-grand- 
father, George L, does not figure as an austere 
or self-denying character ; but he, too, stinted 
bravely in one direction, — the family wash. 
In that beloved court of Hanover, which he 
exchanged so reluctantly for the glories of St. 
James, there was evidently no lack of well-fed, 
well-paid attendants. Looking down the list, 
we see seventy odd postilions and stable-men, 
twenty cooks with six assistants, seven " officers 
of the cellar," twenty-four lackeys in livery, 
sixteen trumpeters and fiddlers, — and only 
two washerwomen. Think of it, — twenty-six 
people to cook, and only two to wash ! " But 
one half-pennyworth of bread to this intoler- 
able deal of sack ! " Yet the chances are that, 
of all the officials in that snug, jolly, dirty little 
Hanoverian court, those two washerwomen 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 185 

alone led comparatively idle lives. When 
balanced with the arduous labors of the seven 
officers of the cellar, I am convinced their 
position was a sinecure. 

Of much the same temper as royal George 
was that great Earl of Northumberland, 
whose expense-book, which may be consulted 
to-day, gives us a delightful insight into some 
of the curious methods of past housekeeping. 
Germany, be it confessed, has always been 
a trifle backward in the matter of cleanli- 
ness, but England, until within the last two 
centuries, was very nearly as conservative. 
Appalling stories are told of the fine ladies 
and gentlemen who glittered in the courts of 
the Tudors and Stuarts, and who, in their 
light-hearted indifference to dirt, very nearly 
rivaled the prowess of the Spanish Isabella, 
when she vowed away her clean linen until 
Ostend should fall, and gave the honor of her 
name to that delicate yellow tint which her 
garments assumed in the interval. The Earl 
of Northumberland, however, aspired to no 
such uneasy asceticism. He was simply the 
model housekeeper of his age. Every item of 
expenditure in his immense establishment was 



186 POINTS OF VIEW, 

rigorously defined, and no less rigorously over- 
looked. With his own noble hands he wrote 
down the exact proportion of food, fuel, and 
candles which each body of retainers was ex- 
pected to consume ; and while the upper ser- 
vants appear to have fared tolerably well, the 
commoner sort enjoyed an unbroken monotony 
of salt meat, black bread, and beer. But it 
is in the matter of tablecloths that his grace 
chiefly excelled, and that he merits an honor- 
able mention in the ranks of esoteric parsimony. 
For his own needs, and for the service and 
pleasure of his many guests, — and let us re- 
member that he kept open house after the hos- 
pitable fashion of his day, — eight of these 
valuable articles were deemed amply sufficient ; 
while in the servants' hall one cloth a month was 
the allowance. Granted, if you please, that in 
this rather effeminate age we have grown un- 
duly fastidious about such trivialities ; yet who, 
looking back through the long vista of years, 
can contemplate without a shudder the condi- 
tion of that tablecloth when its month's servi- 
tude was over ? 

It is easier, however, to jeer at the honorable 
efforts of mankind than to arrange our own 



ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 187 

economies on a strictly satisfactory basis. Be- 
yond a rational and healthy impulse to save 
on others rather than on ourselves, few of us 
can boast of much enlightenment in the mat- 
ter, and even our one unerring guide is, in a 
measure, neutralized by the consistent deter- 
mination of others to exert their own saving 
powers on us. The out-and-out miser is at best 
a creature of little penetration. He cheats 
himself sorely throughout life, and gains a sort 
of shabby posthumous distinction only when 
he is long past enjoying it. The true econo- 
mist is, if we may believe Mrs. Oliphant, a vara 
avis, as exceptional in his way as the true 
genius. She endeavors, indeed, with much 
humility, to describe for us such a character 
in " The Curate in Charge ; " but, while laying 
all possible stress on Mrs. St. John's extraor- 
dinary proficiency, she does not for a moment 
venture to hint at the secret of her power. " I 
don't pretend to know how she did it," con- 
fesses this discriminating authoress, " any more 
than I can tell you how Shakespeare wrote 
'Hamlet.' It was quite easy to him and to 
her, but if one knew how, one would be as great 
a poet as he was, as great an economist as she." 



188 POINTS OF VIEW. 

This is a degree of perfection to which we may 
not well aspire. Shakespeare and Mrs. St. 
John lie equally beyond our humble imitation. 
We do not even feel ambitious of such excel- 
lence, but cherish the more contentedly those 
few finely selected frugalities, those car-fares 
and match-stumps, those postage stamps and 
half sheets of paper, those dimly-lighted rooms 
and evaded custom-house duties, which, while 
they may not leave us much richer at the year's 
end, have yet a distinct ethical value of their 
own, and, breathing an indescribable air of 
conscious rectitude, serve to keep us in har- 
mony with ourselves. 



SCANDERBEG. 

Clio is the most shamelessly unreliable of 
the Muses. She selects her favorites with the 
autocratic partiality of the Russian Catherine, 
decorates them with questionable honors, en- 
riches them with other people's spoils, admires 
them to her heart's content, and thrusts them 
serenely to the front to receive the approbation 
of the world. Occasionally she wearies of one 
or the other, and flings him lightly down from 
the pedestal he has adorned so bravely. Oc- 
casionally, having a fine feminine sense of 
humor, she is pleased to play with our credu- 
lity, and, dressing up a man of straw, she 
assures us smilingly that he is real flesh and 
blood, and worthy of our sincerest admiration. 
And all this while, her best and noblest meet 
with stiffly measured praise, and her strong 
sons are passed indifferently by. It is at least 
amusing to think of the relative positions occu- 
pied by the true mountaineer Scanderbeg, and 
the mythical mountaineer William Tell. The 



190 POINTS OF VIEW. 

one sleeps unremembered with scanty, hard- 
won fame ; the other carries such a weight of 
laurels that poets, wearied with singing his 
praises, have been driven in despair to sing the 
praises of those who praise him, as Coleridge 
piped to the Duchess of Devonshire, — 

"Splendor's fondly fostered child," 

because, in a moment of mild enthusiasm, she 
addressed some well-meant but highly inefficient 
verses to the platform from which Tell did not 
shoot the tyrant Gessler. 

If the heroic struggle for a national life is 
at all times the most engrossing picture the 
world's history has to show us, where shall we 
look for a more vivid illustration of the theme 
than in the long and bitter contest between 
cross and crescent, between the steady, relent- 
less encroachment of the Turkoman power, and 
the vain and dauntless courage which opposed 
it ? The story of the early Ottomans is one of 
wasteful and inexorable conquest, unrelieved 
by any touches of humanity, or any impulses 
towards a higher civilization. To the ferocious 
and impetuous pride of the barbarian they 
added an almost incanceivable wariness and 



SCANDERBEG. 191 

patience ; they knew when to wait and when 
to strike ; they were never unduly elated by 
victory, and never demoralized by defeat. 
That strange dream of their founder Othman 
which won for him his Cilician wife, the mys- 
terious vision of the full moon resting, in his 
bosom, and of the stately tree that sprang 
therefrom, must have dimly hinted to the sav- 
age chief of the glory that was to be. When 
in his sleep he placed Constantinople as a 
jewel upon his swarthy finger, he felt the 
coming of shrouded things, and, believing the 
prophecy would be fulfilled in his descendant, 
he saluted his bride as the mother of a mighty 
race of kings. It was this firm conviction of 
future greatness which made him seek for his 
son Orchan a fairer and nobler wife than 
could be found in the black tents of his fol- 
lowers ; and, true to the instincts of his race, 
he despoiled an enemy to enrich his own hearth. 
A Greek captain, in command of the castle of 
Belecoma, was betrothed to the beautiful 
daughter of a neighboring Christian chief. 
On their marriage night Othman surprised 
the wedding party as they rode through the 
dark mountain passes. The short and desper- 



192 POINTS OF VIEW. 

ate conflict which ensued could have but one 
bitter ending. " The bridegroom was slain, 
and his Greek bride, the Lotus-flower of Brusa, 
was swept off by the Turkoman robbers to 
their lair, to become the spouse of their leader's 
son. " * 

Orchan was a mere boy when he received this 
ravished prize, the fair booty of a barbarous 
strife. Fifty years later, when hair and beard 
were white with age, he married again ; and 
this time his bride was the daughter of a Chris- 
tian emperor, not stolen away from friends and 
kindred, but given to him publicly with superb 
ceremonies, and a ghastly mockery of rejoicing. 
In fifty years the Ottoman power had grown 
into such fierce and sinister lustihood that 
Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Cantacu- 
zene, was assigned as a precious hostage and 
seal of friendship between her father and his 
dreaded Turkish ally. The church refused 
her blessing to this unholy sacrifice, and, amid 
the pomp and majesty of imperial nuptials, 
there was lacking even the outward form of 
Christian marriage. From that date the tide 
of Turkish conquest spread with devastating 

1 The Early Ottomans, by Dean Church. 



SCANDERBEG. 193 

rapidity. The impetuous encroachments of 
Orchan, the steady and irresistible advances 
of Amurath, became under Bajazet a struggle 
for life and death, not with the enfeebled 
powers of Greece, but with a rival conqueror 
who had swept from the broad Tartar steppes 
to subdue and lay waste the Eastern world. 
Eight dynasties had already been destroyed, 
eight crowned heads had been laid low, when 
Timour, grimly ready for a ninth victim, en- 
countered the hitherto invincible sultan. They 
met, and Bajazet, who had seen the flower of 
French and German chivalry perish at his com- 
mand, who had sat at his tent-door to witness 
the day-long massacre of Christian prisoners, 
and who had shadowed the very walls of Con- 
stantinople, — Bajazet was crushed like a worm 
by the lame, white-haired old Tartar, and, eat- 
ing out his heart with dull fury, died in shame- 
ful captivity. But his race survived, vigorous, 
elastic, defiant, and renewed its strength with 
amazing swiftness under Mahommed the Re- 
storer and Amurath the ' Second, whose reign 
was one long conflict with the Greek Emperor 
Manuel, with Sigismund of Hungary, and, 
hardest of all to subdue, with those warlike 



194 POINTS OF VIEW. 

Sclavonic tribes who, often defeated but never 
conquered, maintained with superb courage the 
freedom of their mountain fastnesses. It was 
an unknown Servian soldier who slew Amurath 
the First in the very moment of his triumph ; 
it was the Albanian chief Scanderbeg who re- 
pulsed Amurath the Second, and hurled him 
back to die, shamed and heart-broken, at 
Adrianople. 

Pride of race, love for his native land, shame 
at prolonged captivity, and fury at heaped-up 
wrongs, — all these conflicting passions united 
themselves in the breast of this implacable 
warrior, and urged him relentlessly along his 
appointed path. He was the outcome of that 
ruthless policy by which the Turks turned the 
children of the cross into defenders of the cres- 
cent, a policy pursued with almost undeviating 
success since Black Halil, a century and a half 
before, had urged the training of Christian 
boys into a school of Moslem soldiers. What 
gives to the history of Scanderbeg its peculiar 
significance, and its peculiar ethical and artistic 
value is the fact that he avenged, not only his 
own injuries, but the injuries of countless chil- 
dren who, for over a hundred and fifty years, 



SCANDERBEG. 195 

had been snatched from their homes, families, 
and faith to swell the ranks of an infidel foe. 
Wherever the tide of Ottoman battle raged 
most fiercely, there, savage, dark, invincible, 
stood the Janissaries, men suckled on Christian 
breasts and signed with Christian baptism, 
now flinging away their lives for an alien cause 
and an alien creed, fighting with the irresistible 
courage of fanaticism against their birthright 
and their kindred. Never before or since, in 
the history of all the nations, has a system of 
proselytizing been attended with such tremen- 
dous results. The life-blood of Christendom 
was drained to supply fresh triumphs for its 
enemies, and the rigorous discipline of a mo- 
nastic training moulded these innocent young 
captives into a soldiery whose every thought 
and every action was subordinate to one over- 
powering influence, an austere, unquestioning 
obedience to the cause of Islam. 

With the example of this extraordinary suc- 
cess always before their eyes, it is little wonder 
that the Turks regarded the children of the 
vanquished as so many docile instruments to 
be fashioned by rigid tutelage into faithful 
followers of the Prophet, and the first step 



196 POINTS OF VIEW. 

towards this desired goal lay in their early adop- 
tion of the Mohammedan faith. No pang of 
pity, no sentiment of honor, interfered with this 
relentless purpose. When John Castriota, the 
hereditary lord of Croia, yielded up his four 
sons as hostages to Amurath the Second, he 
relied on the abundant promises made him by 
that sovereign, who had, on the whole, a fair 
reputation for keeping his royal word. The 
lads were carried to Adrianople and reared in 
the sultan's palace, where one at least of the 
little prisoners attracted dangerous notice by 
his vivacity and grace, — inheritances, it is 
said, from his beautiful mother, Voisava. The 
fair-haired boy, then only eight years old, be- 
came first the plaything of the seraglio, and 
afterwards the jealously guarded favorite of 
Amurath himself. He was carefully taught, 
and was forced to conform to the ceremonial 
rites of the Ottomans, and to make an open 
profession of his new creed, receiving on this 
occasion the name of Scanderbeg, a name des- 
tined to carry with it a just retribution in the 
universal terror it excited. How much of 
Christian belief still lingered in the child's 
soul, or how much he gained afterwards from 



SCANDERBEG. 197 

the Albanian soldiers who had access to him, 
it is impossible to say. Young as he was, he 
had learned, amid the unutterable treachery 
and corruption of an Eastern court, to hide 
his emotions under an impenetrable mask, so 
that even Amurath, cruel, wily, and suspicious, 
found himself baffled by this Greek boy, whose 
handsome face betrayed to none the impetuous 
anger that consumed him. At nineteen he 
had command of five thousand horsemen, and 
enjoyed the title of pasha, a barren honor for 
one soon to be robbed of his birthright. After 
the close of the Hungarian war John Castriota 
died, and Amurath, ignoring his plighted 
faith, seized Croia in the name of the captive 
princes, ruthlessly extinguished its civil and 
religious liberties, turned the churches into 
mosques, and treated the whole country as a 
defeated and dependent province. Scander- 
beg's three brothers were conveniently re- 
moved by poison ; he himself, the object of a 
curious affection on the sultan's part, was 
watched with jealous and exacting eyes, and 
for a while it seemed as though the free-born 
mountain chief would add one more to the 
long list of Turkish proselytes and favorites, 



198 POINTS OF VIEW. 

silenced with doubtful titles, bought with dis- 
honorable wealth. 

But it was a time of waiting, a time ominous 
with delay. The heir of Croia, mute, patient, 
and resolved, bided with steady self -control the 
hour when he could strike a single blow for 
faith and freedom. It came with the breaking 
out of fresh Hungarian troubles : with the de- 
fiance sent by John Hunyadi and his forces 
drawn up on the banks of the Moravia. 
While the Ottoman armies were engaged in 
this most disastrous conflict, Scanderbeg threw 
off his long-endured disguise, possessed himself 
by an unscrupulous device of his native city, 
and put all who opposed him to the sword. 
From that day until his death, forty years 
later, the record of his life is one perpetual 
heroic struggle to preserve the hard- won liberty 
of Epeiros, a struggle without intermission or 
relief, without rest for the victor or pity for 
the vanquished. His scornful indifference to 
pressing dangers was in itself the best of tonics 
to a people naturally brave, but taught by 
bitter experience to fear the inexorable Turkish 
yoke. Scanderbeg feared nothing ; with him, 
indeed, fear was swallowed up in hatred. He 



SCANDERBEG. 199 

understood perfectly the nature of the warfare 
in which he was engaged ; he knew that, with 
adroitness and vigilance, every dark pass and 
every rocky crag became his friend and ally. 
He knew, too, the slender resources of the 
country, and never committed the mistake of 
taking more men into the field than he could 
manage and support. When Amurath sent 
an army of forty thousand soldiers to punish 
Croia, and bring back the rebel chief " alive 
or dead" to Adrianople, Scanderbeg limited 
his own forces to seven thousand foot and eight 
thousand horse, when he might, had he chosen, 
have trebled that number. With this compact 
body of picked and hardy warriors he lay in 
wait for the enemy, entrapped them by a feigned 
retreat into a narrow defile, and, hemming 
them in on either side, filled up the valley with 
their slain. Over twenty thousand Turks 
perished in that dreadful snare, many of them 
being trampled down by their helpless and 
panic-stricken countrymen. It was Scander- 
beg's first decisive victory, and a grim warning 
to Amurath of the possibilities that awaited 
him in the future. It gave to Croia a breath- 
ing spell, and to its victorious army the rich 



200 POINTS OF VIEW. 

spoils of an Ottoman camp, so that those who 
had gone forth meagrely on foot returned well 
armed and bravely mounted to their rock-built 
citadel. 

Had this sudden and bewildering success 
been followed up by a vigorous aggressive 
warfare on the part of Servia, Hungary, and 
Poland, then all in arms against their common 
foe ; had the allied powers listened to the moun- 
tain chiefs, or to the burning remonstrances 
of Cardinal Julian, the pope's legate, the 
Turks might have been driven forcibly back 
from Europe, and long centuries of suffering 
and dishonor spared to Christendom. But the 
lord of Servia, George Brankovich, yearned for 
his children whom Amurath held as hostages ; 
Ladislaw, king of Hungary and Poland, was 
weary of the perpetual strife ; even Hunyadi's 
fiery voice was silenced ; and a treaty of peace 
was signed with an enemy who might then, and 
then only, have been crushed. This treaty, 
shameful in itself, was still more shamefully 
broken in the following year, when the Chris- 
tian hosts again took the field, only to be 
utterly routed in the terrible battle of St. 
Martin's Eve. Never was disaster more com- 



SCANDERBEG. 201 

plete : Ladislaw's severed head, borne on a pike 
over the Ottoman ranks, struck terror and de- 
spair into the hearts of his followers ; Hunya- 
di, after a vain, furious effort to redeem this 
ghastly symbol of defeat, fled from a field red 
with his countrymen's blood ; the papal legate 
and two Hungarian bishops perished in the 
thickest of the fray. It was the beginning 
of the end, and four years later the cause of 
Christendom received its deathblow at Kos- 
sova, when Hunyadi, beaten finally back from 
Servia, was taught by the bitterness of defeat 
that his name no longer sounded ominously, 
as of old, in the ears of his Moslem foe. Only 
Scanderbeg remained unsubdued amid his 
mountain peaks, and Amurath, flushed with 
conquest, now turned his whole attention to 
the final punishment of this audacious rebel. 

The scale on which the invasion of Croia 
was planned shows in itself how deep-seated 
was the sultan's anger, and how relentless his 
purpose. One hundred and sixty thousand 
men were assembled in Adrianople, the ablest 
generals were united in command, and Mo- 
hammed, his savage son and successor, accom- 
panied the expedition, filled with fierce hopes 



202 POINTS OF VIEW. 

of vengeanceo Resistance seemed almost vain, 
but Scanderbeg, in no way disturbed by the 
coming storm, prepared with characteristic 
coolness to meet it at every point. He ordered 
all who dwelt in the open country or in unpro- 
tected villages to destroy their harvests and to 
quit their homes, so that the enemy might find 
no resources in the scorched and deserted fields. 
The women and children, the aged and infirm, 
were sent either to the sea-coast or out of the 
kingdom, many of them as far away as Venice. 
The fortifications of Croia were repaired ; 
the garrison was strengthened and put under 
command of a brave and able governor, and 
Scanderbeg himself, with only ten thousand 
men, took the field, ready to waylay and harass 
Amurath at every step of his difficult and dan- 
gerous march. The first severe fighting was 
done before the walls of Setigrade, a strongly 
guarded town which made a gallant resistance, 
repulsing the Turks again and again, and only 
yielding when a traitor, bought by the sultan's 
gold, poisoned the fountains which supplied 
the city with water. From this point the in- 
vading army marched on to Croia, covered the 
surrounding plains, planted their cannon — 



SCANDERBEG. 203 

then an imposing novelty in warfare — before 
its massive gates, and summoned the garrison 
to surrender. A defiant refusal was returned ; 
the Ottomans stormed the walls, and were re- 
pulsed with such fury that over eight thousand 
Janissaries perished in the combat, while 
Scanderbeg, poised like an eagle on the cliffs, 
waited until the battle was at its height, and 
then sweeping down on the unconscious foe, 
forced their trenches, fired the camp, and drove 
all before him with terrible havoc and slaugh- 
ter. By the time Mohammed could rally his 
scattered forces, the Epeirots were off and 
away, with little scathe or damage to them- 
selves ; and this exasperating method of attack 
was the weapon with which the mountain chief 
finally wore out the courage and endurance 
of the invaders. Every inch of ground was 
familiar to him, and a snare to his enemies. 
Did Mohammed, burning with rage, scale the 
hills in pursuit, a handful of men held him at 
bay ; while Scanderbeg, appearing as if by 
magic on the other side of the camp, chose this 
propitious moment for an attack. By day or 
night he gave the enemy no truce, no respite, 
no quarter. Two hours out of the twenty-four 



204 POINTS OF VIEW. 

he slept, and all the rest he spent in unceas- 
ing, unwearying, unpitying warfare ; until the 
Turks, harassed by a danger ever present but 
never visible, lost heart and trembled before 
the breathless energy of their foe. They were 
beginning also to suffer from a scarcity of pro- 
visions, and Scanderbeg took excellent care 
that this trouble should not be too speedily re- 
lieved. The supplies, brought at an immense 
cost from Desia, w r ere intercepted and carried 
off triumphantly to the hills, and the unhappy 
Ottomans, starved in camp and slaughtered 
out of it, realized with ever-increasing dismay 
the unenviable nature of their position. 

It must be admitted, in justice to the 
Epeirots, that the success of Scanderbeg's ma- 
noeuvres rested exclusively on their absolute 
and unquestioned fidelity. Swift and sure in- 
formation was brought him of every movement 
on the enemy's part, and vigilant eyes kept 
watch over every rocky pass that gave access 
to his haunts. For once Amurath's gold was 
powerless to buy a single traitor, and the syste- 
matic perfidy by which the Turks were accus- 
tomed to steal what they could not grasp failed 
for once of its prey. After a fruitless effort 



SCANDERBEG. 205 

to undermine the rock on which Croia was 
founded, the sultan sought to corrupt first the 
governor and then the garrison with dazzling 
offers of advancement, but all the wealth in 
Adrianople could not purchase one poor Chris- 
tian soldier. Baffled and heart-sick with re- 
peated failure, Amurath at last offered to raise 
the siege and depart, on payment of a small 
yearly sum, a mere nominal tribute to salve 
his wounded pride. Even this trifling conces- 
sion was sternly refused by Scanderbeg, who 
would yield nothing to his hated foe. Then 
for the first time the sultan understood the 
relentless nature of this man whom he had 
petted as a child and wronged as a boy, whom 
he had held a helpless hostage in his hands, 
and who now defied him with unutterable aver- 
sion and scorn. Abandoning himself to grief, 
fury, and despair, he tore his white beard, and 
recalled his countless triumphs in the past, 
only to compare them with this shameful over- 
throw. He who had seen the allied powers of 
Christendom suing at his feet, to be humbled 
in his old age by an insignificant Illyrian 
chieftain ! The blow broke his proud heart, 
and on his death-bed he conjured his son to 



206 POINTS OF VIEW. 

avenge his name and honor. Gladly Moham- 
med undertook the task, but the present was 
no time for its fulfillment. The siege of Croia 
was raised, the dejected Moslem army strag- 
gled homewards, cruelly harassed at every 
step by their unwearied foe, and Scanderbeg 
once more entered his native city amid the 
acclamations of a brave people, born again 
to freedom, and wild to welcome their de- 
liverer. 

It is pleasant to think that, before being 
called a third time into the field, even this in- 
domitable fighter found a little leisure in which 
to marry a wife, and to cultivate the arts of 
peace. Domestic tranquillity ran but a slender 
chance of palling on its possessor in those stir- 
ring days ; but Scanderbeg made the most of 
his limited opportunities. He carried his 
bride in triumph to every corner of his little 
kingdom, he labored hard to restore those 
habits of thrift and industry which perpetual 
warfare roots out of every nation, and he 
wisely refrained from overtaxing the narrow 
resources of his people. When his purse was 
empty, he looked to his enemies and not to his 
friends for its replenishment; and that stout 



SCANDERBEG. 207 

old adage, " The Turk's dominions are Scan- 
derbeg's revenues," is a sufficient witness to 
his admirable financiering. He realized fully 
that the legacy of hate bequeathed by Amurath 
to Mohammed would bear bitter fruits in the 
hands of that fierce and able monarch, and so 
employed every interval of peace in strength- 
ening himself for the struggle that was to fol- 
low. Twice again during his lifetime was 
Epeiros invaded by the Ottomans ; and Scan- 
derbeg, driven from his lair, was hunted like a 
deer from hill to hill, now lying in covert, now 
fiercely resisting, but unconquered always. 
Wily offers of friendship from the sultan were 
received with a not unnatural suspicion, and 
courteously declined ; hired assassins were de- 
tected, and delivered up to a prompt and piti- 
less justice. For forty years this Albanian 
soldier defended his mountain eyrie from a 
power vast enough to destroy two empires, 
and cruel enough to make the whole Eastern 
world tremble. Constantinople fell, while 
Croia stood unharmed. The last news brought 
to Scanderbeg, as he lay dying at Lyssa, was 
that the Turks had invaded the Venetian do- 
minions. The feeble warrior raised himself in 



208 POINTS OF VIEW. 

bed, and called for his sword and armor. " Tell 
them," he gasped, " that I will be with them 
to-morrow," and fell back fainting on his pil- 
lows. On the morrow he was dead. 






ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 

Sandwiches, oranges, and penny novelettes 
are the three great requisites for English trav- 
eling, — for third-class traveling, at least ; and, 
of the three, the novelette is by far the most 
imperative, a pleasant proof of how our intel- 
lectual needs outstrip our bodily requirements. 
The clerks and artisans, shopgirls, dressmak- 
ers, and milliners, who pour into London every 
morning by the early trains, have, each and 
every one, a choice specimen of penny fiction 
with which to beguile the short journey, and 
perhaps the few spare minutes of a busy day. 
The workingman who slouches up and down 
the platform, waiting for the moment of de- 
parture, is absorbed in some crumpled bit of 
pink-covered romance. The girl who lounges 
opposite to us in the carriage, and who would 
be a very pretty girl in any other conceivable 
hat, sucks mysterious sticky lozenges, and 
reads a story called " Mariage a la Mode, or 
Getting into Society," which she subsequently 



210 POINTS OF VIEW. 



% 



lends to me, — seeing, I think, the covetous 
looks I cast in its direction, — and which I 
find gives as vivid and startling a picture of 
high life as one could reasonably expect for a 
penny. Should I fail to provide myself with 
one of these popular journals at the book-stall, 
another chance is generally afforded me before 
the train moves off ; and I am startled out of 
a sleepy reverie by a small boy's thrusting " A 
Black Business " alarmingly into my face, 
while a second diminutive lad on the platform 
holds out to me enticingly " Fettered for Life," 
"Neranya's Revenge," and "Ruby." The 
last has on the cover an alluring picture of a 
circus girl jumping through a hoop, which 
tempts me to the rashness of a purchase, circus 
riders being my literary weakness. I remem- 
ber, myself, trying to write a story about one, 
when I was fourteen, and experiencing great 
difficulty from a comprehensive and all-embra- 
cing ignorance of my subject. It is but fair 
to the author of " Ruby " to say that he was 
too practiced a w r orkman to be disconcerted 
or turned from his course by any such trivial 
disadvantage. 

I should hardly like to confess how many 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 211 

coins of the realm I dissipated before learn- 
ing the melancholy truth, that the seductive 
titles and cuts which form the tours deforce 
of penny fiction bear but a feeble affinity to 
the tales themselves, which are like vials of 
skimmed milk, labeled absinthe, but warranted 
to be wholly without flavor. Mr. James Payn, 
who has written very amusingly about the 
mysterious weekly journals which lie " thick 
as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Val- 
lombrosa " upon the counters of small, dark 
shops, " in the company of cheap tobacco, 
hardbake, and, at the proper season, valen- 
tines," laments with frank asperity that he can 
find in them neither dramatic interest, nor even 
impropriety. He has searched them patiently 
for something wrong, and his quest has been 
wholly unrewarded. Mr. Thomas Wright, in 
a paper published some years ago in the " Nine- 
teenth Century," makes a similar complaint. 
The lovely heroines of these stories are " virtu- 
ous even to insipidity," and their heroes are so 
blamably blameless as to be absolutely revolt- 
ing. Yet it has been my fate to encounter 
some very pretty villains in the course of my 
penny readings, and at least one specimen of 



212 POINTS OF VIEW. 

the sinful gilded youth, who has " handsome 
blonde hair parted in the middle, a discon- 
tented mustache, a pale face and apathetic ex- 
pression." This scion of the aristocracy, I am 
grieved to say, keeps beautiful Jewesses on 
board his sumptuous yacht, and otherwise mis- 
behaves himself after a fashion calculated to 
make his relatives and well-wishers more dis- 
contented even than his mustache. He has a 
lovely sister, Alma, with whom, we are assured, 
the Prince of Wales danced three times in one 
night, " and was also heard to express his ad- 
miration of her looks and her esprit in some 
very emphatic superlatives, exciting a variety 
of comment and criticism." Naturally, and all 
the more naturally because the fair Alma dis- 
creetly reserves her esprit for royal ears and 
royal commendation, and is exceedingly chary 
of revealing any of it to interested readers, who 
are fain to know what kind of conversation the 
Prince found so diverting. From the speci- 
mens presented to our consideration, we are 
forced to conclude either that his Highness is 
easily satisfied in the matter of esprit, or that 
he has an almost superhuman power of detect- 
ing it when hidden from ordinary observation. 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 213 

The wonderful dullness of penny fiction is 
not really due to the absence of incidents, of 
vice, or even of dramatic situations, but to the 
placidity with which these incidents or situa- 
tions are presented and received. How can 
we reasonably be expected to excite ourselves 
over a catastrophe which makes little or no im- 
pression on the people most deeply concerned 
in it ? When Bonny Adair engages herself, 
with guileless alacrity, to a man who has a wife 
already, the circumstance is narrated with a 
coolness which hardly allows of a tremor. The 
wife herself is not the hidden, mysterious, 
veiled creature* with whom we are all familiar ; 
not an actress, or a ballet girl, or an adven- 
turess ; but a highly respectable young lady, 
going into society, and drinking tea with poor 
Bonny at afternoon receptions. This would 
seem like a startling innovation, but as nobody 
else expresses any surprise at the matter, why 
should we ? Bonny herself, it is explained, 
put no embarrassing questions to her suitor. 
" She was only a simple country maid. She 
knew that he loved her, and that was all she 
cared for." Still, to drink tea amicably with 
the wife of her pretendu is too much even for 



214 POINTS OF VIEW. 

a simple country maid ; and when Bonny is 
formally introduced to " Mrs. Alec Doyle," she 
feels it time to withdraw from the scene and 
become a hospital nurse, until a convenient 
accident in the hunting-field removes the in- 
trusive spouse, and reestablishes her claim to 
the husband. 

The same well-bred indifference is revealed 
in a more sensational story called " Elfrida's 
Wooing," where we have a villainous uncle 
foiled in his base plots ; a father supposed to 
be drowned, but turning up just at the critical 
moment ; a wicked lover baffled, a virtuous 
lover rewarded. This sounds •promising, but 
in reality everything is taken with such won- 
derful calm that not a ripple of excitement 
breaks over the smooth surface of the tale. 
There is even an abduction, which surely can- 
not be an every-day occurrence in English 
clerical life, — I do not remember anything 
like it in one of Trollope's novels, — and by 
mistake the wrong girl, the vicar's daughter, is 
carried off by the rogues. But no matron of 
feudal times could have betrayed less annoy- 
ance at the incident than does the vicar's wife. 
" Rupert," she remarks placidly to her son, " it 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 215 

is your place to go and look for your sister." 
" Where shall I go ? " is the brother's languid 
query. To which his mother retorts, with some 
fretf ulness : " How can I tell you ? If I knew, 
I should be able to send for her myself," — a 
very simple and a very sensible way of stating 
the case ; but it sounds as if the pet dog, rather 
than the only daughter of the family, had been 
spirited suddenly away. 

The most striking instance, however, of that 
repose of mien which stamps the caste of 
penny-fiction characters I found in a delightful 
little romance entitled " Golden Chains," where 
the heroine marries the villain to oblige a 
friend, and is rewarded for her amiability by 
being imprisoned in a ruined castle, situated 
vaguely "on a lonely hillside looking down 
upon the blue Mediterranean." Apparently, 
nothing can be easier than to dispose of super- 
fluous wives in this particular locality of Italy, 
for no impertinent questions are asked ; and 
Ernestine, proving intractable, is left by her 
husband, Captain Beamish, an English officer 
of a type not yet elucidated by Rudyard Kip- 
ling, to starve quietly in her dungeon. She is 
prevented from fulfilling this agreeable des- 



216 POINTS OF VIEW. 

tiny by the accidental drowning of the captain, 
and the accidental arrival of her lover, — the 
virtuous hero, — who is traveling providentially 
in the south of Europe, and who has a taste for 
exploring ruins. This gentlemanly instinct 
leads to the discovery of his beloved in a coma- 
tose condition, " but beautiful still," though 
" her youthful roundness was gone forever." 
Surely now, the reader thinks, there will be a 
scene of transport, of fierce wrath, of mingled 
agony and rapture. Nothing of the sort. 
Linden merely " lifts the fair head upon his 
arm," and administers a dose of brandy. Then, 
as Ernestine's eyes open, he murmurs, " ' Dear- 
est, do you know me ? ' 4 Yes,' she faintly 
answered. 'AH is well, Nessa. You have 
been cruelly used, but all is well. You are 
safe with me. Tell me, dear one, you are glad 
to see me.' " 

If she were not glad to see him, under the 
circumstances, it would indicate an extraordi- 
nary indifference, not so much to love as to life ; 
and the modesty which, in such a case, could 
doubt a hearty welcome seems like an exagger- 
ated emotion. But the hero of penny fiction 
is the least arrogant of mortals. He worships 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 217 

from afar, and expresses his affection in lan- 
guage which at times is almost obsequious in its 
timidity. He is never passionate, never exult- 
ant, never the least bit foolish, and never for 
a single moment relapses into humanity. Yet 
millions of people believe in him, love him, 
cherish him, and hail his weekly reappearance 
with sincere and unwearied applause. 

The Unknown Public, that huge body of 
readers who meddle not with Euskin, nor with 
Browning, nor with Herbert Spencer, who 
have no acquaintance with George Eliot, and 
to whom even Thackeray and Scott are as re- 
condite as George Meredith and Walter Pater, 
has been an object of interest and curiosity to 
its neighbor, the Known Public, ever since 
Wilkie Collins formally introduced it into good 
society, more than thirty years ago. This in- 
terest is mingled with philanthropy, and is 
apt to be a little didactic in the expression of 
its regard. Wilkie Collins, indeed, after the 
easy-going fashion of his generation, was con- 
tent to take the Unknown Public as he found 
it, and to wonder vaguely whether the same 
man wrote all the stories that were so fear- 
fully and wonderfully alike : " a combination 



218 POINTS OF VIEW. 

of fierce melodrama and meek domestic senti- 
ment ; short dialogues and paragraphs on the 
French pattern, with English moral reflections 
of the sort that occur on the top lines of chil- 
dren's copybooks ; descriptions and conversa- 
tions for the beginning of the number, and a 
1 strong situation ' dragged in by the neck and 
shoulders for the end." It was in the An- 
swers to Correspondents, however, that the dis- 
tinguished novelist confesses he took the keen- 
est delight, — in the punctilious reader, who 
is anxious to know the correct hour at which 
to visit a newly married couple ; in the prac- 
tical reader, who asks how to make crumpets 
and liquid blacking ; in the sentimental reader, 
who has received presents from a gentleman to 
whom she is not engaged, and desires the ed- 
itor's sanction for the deed ; in the timorous 
reader, who is afraid of a French invasion and 
of dragonflies. The scraps of editorial wisdom 
doled out to these benighted beings were, in 
Wilkie Collins's opinion, well worth the jour- 
nal's modest price. He was rejoiced to know 
that " a sensible and honorable man never 
flirts himself, and ever despises flirts of the 
other sex." He was still more pleased to be 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 219 

told, " When you have a sad trick of blushing, 
on being introduced to a young lady, and when 
you want to correct the habit, summon to your 
aid a serene and manly confidence." 

Members of the Known Public who explore 
the wilds and deeps of penny fiction to-day are 
less satisfied with what they see, less flippant 
in their methods of criticism, and less disposed 
to permit mankind to be amused after its own 
dull fashion. " Let us raise the tone of these 
popular journals," is their cry, " and we shall 
soon have millions of readers taking rational 
delight in wholesome literature. Let us pub- 
lish good stories at a penny apiece, — in fact, 
it is our plain duty to do so, — and these mil- 
lions of readers will, with grateful hearts, rise 
up and call us blessed." To which Mr. Payn 
responds mirthfully that the Unknown Public 
is every whit as sure of what it wants as the 
Known Public that aspires to teach it, and 
perhaps even a little surer. " The Count of 
Monte Cristo," " The Wandering Jew," " Ivan- 
hoe," and " White Lies " were all offered in 
turn at a penny apiece, and were in turn re- 
jected. That it does occasionally accept bet- 
ter fiction, if it can get it cheap, we have the 



220 POINTS OF VIEW. 

word of Mr. Wright, who claims to have been 
for years a member of this mysterious body, 
and to have an inner knowledge of what it 
likes and dislikes. " The Woman in White," 
" Lady Audley's Secret," and " It is Never 
Too Late to Mend " are, he asserts, familiar 
names with a certain stratum of the Unknown 
Public ; " Midshipman Easy " is an old friend, 
and " The Pathfinder " and " The Last of the 
Mohicans " enjoy a fitful popularity. But its 
real favorite, its admitted pride and delight, 
is Ouida. The " genteel young ladies of the 
counter," and their hard-working sisterhood 
of dressmakers and milliners and lodging- 
house keepers, all accept Ouida as a literary 
oracle. " They quite agree with herself that 
she is a woman of genius. They recognize 
in her the embodiment of their own inex- 
pressible imaginings of aristocratic people and 
things. They believe in her Byronic charac- 
ters, and their Arabian-Nights-like wealth and 
power ; in her titanic and delightfully wicked 
guardsmen ; in her erratic or ferocious, but al- 
ways gorgeous princes, her surpassingly lovely, 
but more or less immoral grand dames, and 
her wonderful Bohemians of both sexes. They 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 221 

believe, too, in her sheer 6 fine writing.' Its 
jingle is pleasant to their senses, even though 
they fail to catch its meaning. Ouida's work 
is essentially the acme of penny-serial style. 
The novelists of the penny prints toil after her 
in vain, but they do toil after her. They aim 
at the same gorgeousness of effect, though they 
lack her powers to produce it, to impress it 
vividly upon readers." 

It has not been my experience to find in 
these weeklies — and I have read many of 
them — even a dim reflection of Ouida's mere- 
tricious glitter. A gentle and unobtrusive 
dullness ; a smooth fluency of style, suggestive 
of the author's having written several hundreds 
of such stories before, and turning them out 
with no more intellectual effort than an organ- 
grinder uses in turning the crank of his organ ; 
an air of absolute unreality about the charac- 
ters, not so much from overdrawing as from 
their deadly sameness ; conversations of vapid 
sprightliness and an atmosphere of oppressive 
respectability, — these are the characteristics 
of penny fiction, if I may judge from the va- 
ried specimens that have fallen into my hands. 
The foreign scoundrels and secret poisoners, 



222 POINTS OF VIEW. 

the sumptuous wealth and lavish bloodshed, 
that thrilled the boyhood of Mr. Wright have, 
I greatly fear, been refined out of existence. 
There is an occasional promise of this sort of 
thing, but never any adequate fulfillment. I 
once hoped much from the opening paragraph 
of a tale describing the virtuous heroine's 
wicked husband in language which seemed to 
me full of bright auspices for his future : — 

" The speaker was a fair, well-dressed man, 
in appearance about three-and-thirty. A yel- 
low mustache increased the languid, insouciant 
expression of his long, well-cut features, which 
were handsome, but, despite their delicacy, 
had a singular animal resemblance in them, — 
God's image in the possession of a cool, un- 
principled fiend, which now and then peered 
out of the pale blue eyes, half veiled by the 
yellow lashes." 

Yet, with all his advantages of physiognomy, 
the utmost this pale-eyed person achieves is 
to hang around in his wife's way until she 
shoots him, — accidentally, of course, — and 
secures herself from any further annoyance. 

In a taste for aristocracy, however, and a 
splendid contempt for trade, and " the city," 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 223 

and the objectionable middle classes, our penny- 
novelist surpasses even Ouida, and approaches 
more nearly to that enamored exponent of high 
life, Lord Beaconsfield. He will dance his 
puppets, as Tony Lumpkin's boon companion 
danced his bear, " only to the very genteelest 
of tunes." Mr. Edward Salmon, who has 
written with amazing seriousness on " What 
the Working Classes Read," and who thinks 
it a pity " more energy is not exerted in bring- 
ing home to the people the inherent attractions 
of Shakespeare, Scott, Marryat, Dickens, Lyt- 
ton, and George Eliot," makes the distinct 
assertion that socialism and a hatred of the 
fashionable world are fostered by the penny 
serials, and by the pictures they draw of a lux- 
urious and depraved nobility. " The stories," 
he says gravely, u are utterly contemptible in 
literary execution. They thrive on the wicked 
baronet, the faithless but handsome peeress, 
and find their chief supporters among shop- 
girls, seamstresses, and domestic servants. It 
is hardly surprising that there should exist in 
the impressionable minds of the masses an 
aversion more or less deep to the upper classes. 
If one of their own order, man or woman, ap- 



224 POINTS OF VIEW. 

pears in the pages of these unwholesome prints, 
it is only as a paragon of virtue, who is proba- 
bly ruined, or at least wronged, by that incar- 
nation of evil, the sensuous aristocrat, standing 
six feet, with his dark eyes, heavy mustache, 
pearl-like teeth, and black hair. Throughout 
the story the keynote struck is high-born 
scoundrelism. Every social misdemeanor is 
called in to assist the progress of the slipshod 
narrative. Crime and love are the essential 
ingredients, and the influence exercised over 
the feminine reader, often unenlightened by 
any close contact with the classes whom the 
novelist pretends to portray, crystallizes into 
an irremovable dislike of the upper strata of 
society." 1 

It is hard, after reading this extract, to be- 
lieve that Mr. Salmon ever examined any of 
these " slipshod narratives " for himself, or he 
would know that the aristocrat of penny fiction 
is always fair. The stalwart young farmer, 
the aspiring artist, the sailor lover, may rival 
each other in dark clustering curls, but the 
peer, as befits his rank, is monotonously 
blonde. 

1 The Nineteenth Century. 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 225 

"The dark was dowered with heauty, 
The fair was nobly born. 
In the face of the one was hatred ; 
In the face of the other, scorn." 

Mr. Hamilton Aide probably does not design 
his graceful verses as illustrations of weekly 
novelettes, but lie understands better than Mr. 
Salmon the subtle sympathy between birth and 
coloring. 

Neither have I discovered any socialistic 
tendency in these stories, nor any disposition 
to exalt the lower orders at the expense of the 
upper. The Clara Vere de Veres who smiled 
on me in the course of my researches were all 
as virtuous as they were beautiful, and their 
noble lovers were models of chivalry and truth. 
It was the scheming lawyer, the base-born, 
self-made man of business, who crept as a ser- 
pent into their patrician Eden, and was treated 
with the contempt and contumely he deserved. 
In one instance, such an upstart, Mr. John 
Farlow by name, ventures to urge upon an im- 
poverished landholder his offers of friendship 
and assistance, and this is the spirit in which 
bis advances are received : — 

" The colonel shudders, as he gazes, half 
wearily, half scornfully, at the shapeless, squat 



/ 



\ 



226 POINTS OF VIEW. 

figure of the Caliban-like creature before him. 
That he, Courtenay St. Leger Walterton, late 
in command of her Majesty's Lancers, should 
have to listen respectfully to the hectoring of 
this low city rascal, while a horsepond awaits 
without, and a collection of horsewhips hang 
ready for instant application on the hunting- 
rack in the hall within ! Yet it is so ; he is 
wholly at this man's mercy, and the colonel, 
like the humblest of mankind, is obliged to 
succumb to the inevitable." 

Now, since I turned the last page of " Ten 
Thousand a Year," a long, long time ago, I 
have hardly met with a finer instance of aris- 
tocratic feeling than this, or a more crushing 
disdain for the ignoble creature known as a 
solicitor. Mr. John Farlow is of course a vil- 
lain, but Courtenay St. Leger Walterton is not 
aware of this fact, and neither, in the begin- 
ning of the tale, is the reader. What we do 
know, however, is that, being a " low city ras- 
cal," he naturally merits horsewhipping at the 
hands of a blue-blooded country squire. He 
would have deserved hanging, had the colonel 
been a duke, and perhaps that punishment 
might have been meted triumphantly out to 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 227 

him, for the penny novelist, with all his faults, 
still " loves his House of Peers." 

The task of providing literature for the Un- 
known Public is not the easy thing it seems to 
critics like Mr. Wright and Mr. Salmon. The 
Unknown Public has its literature already, — 
a literature which enjoys an enormous circu- 
lation, and gives absolute satisfaction. One 
publishing company alone, "for the people," 
claims that its penny novelettes, issued weekly, 
reach seven millions of readers, and these 
seven millions are evidently content with what 
they receive. Mr. Andrew Lang is responsi- 
ble for the statement that a story about a mill 
girl, which was printed in a Glasgow penny 
journal, so delighted the subscribers that they 
demanded it should be several times repeated 
in its columns. " There could not," says Mr. 
Lang somewhat wistfully, " be a more perfect 
and gratifying success ; " and publishers of 
ambitious and high-toned periodicals may well 
be forgiven for envying such a master-stroke. 
When were they ever asked to reprint a story, 
however vaunted its perfections, however pop- 
ular it seemed to be ? The heroine of this 
magic tale is defrauded of her inheritance by 



228 POINTS OF VIEW. 

villains who possess sumptuous subterranean 
palaces and torture-chambers in " her own ro- 
mantic town " of Glasgow, the last place in 
the world where we should reasonably expect 
to find them. "The one essential feature," 
Mr. Lang observes, "in. a truly successful 
tale is that there should be an ingenue, as pure 
as poor, who is debarred by conspiracies from 
the enjoyment of a prodigious fortune." This 
is a favorite device with weekly papers at 
home, and the serial story, on either side of 
the Atlantic, is perforce a little more stirring 
in its character than that presented to us in 
finished form through the medium of the 
penny novelette. With the first, the " strong 
situation " is serviceable as a decoy to lure the 
reader into purchasing the following number. 
With the second, no such artifice is needed or 
employed. The buyer has his pennyworth al- 
ready in hand ; and a very good pennyworth 
it is, judged by quantity alone. Wilkie Col- 
lins tells us how he tried vainly to extract from 
a shopman an opinion as to which was the best 
journal to select, and how the shopman per- 
sisted, very naturally, in saying that there was 
no choice, — one was every bit as long as 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 229 

another. " Well, you see some likes one, and 
some the next. Take 'em all the year around, 
and there ain't a pin, as I knows of, to choose 
between them. There 's just about as much in 
one as there is in its neighbor. All good 
penn'orths. Bless my soul ! Just take 'em up 
and look for yourself ! All good penn'orths, 
choose where you like." 

Exactly as if they were shrimps or peri- 
winkles ! Very good measure, if you chance 
to like the stuff ! "Dorothy, a Home Journal 
for Ladies," in a rather attractive pale green 
cover, gives you every week a complete story, 
nearly half the length of an average English 
novel, and fairly well illustrated with full-page 
cuts. Each number contains, in addition, 
Dorothy's Letter-Box, where all reasonable 
questions are answered, and Dorothy's Draw- 
ing-Room, with items of fashionable news, — 
the whereabouts of the Queen, and the inter- 
esting fact that "the Duke and Duchess of 
Portland have been living quietly and giving 
no parties at Langwell, the Duke being desir- 
ous of affording the Duchess every chance of 
better regaining her health." Also Hints for 
Practical Dressmaking, by " Busy Bee ; " 



230 POINTS OF VIEW. 

Our Homes, by " Lady Bird ; " an occasional 
poem; and Notes on Handwriting, where* you 
may learn that you have " ambition, an ardent, 
tender, affectionate, and sensitive nature, easily 
impressed, and inclined to jealousy. There 
is also some sense of beauty, vivid fancy, and 
sequence of ideas." Now and then a doubting 
maid sends a scrap of her lover's penmanship 
to be deciphered, and receives the following 
gentle encouragement : — 

" Love Lies Bleeding. — I hardly like to 
say whether the writer of the morsel you in- 
close would make a good husband ; but I 
should imagine him as thoughtful for others, 
romantic and loving, very orderly in his habits, 
and fairly well educated ; rather hot-tempered, 
but forgives and forgets quickly." 

All this for a penny, — two cents of Ameri- 
can money ! No wonder " Dorothy " reaches 
her millions of readers. No wonder the little 
green books lie in great heaps on the counters 
of every railway station in England. She is, 
perhaps, the most high-toned of such weekly 
issues ; but " The Princess," in a bright blue 
cover, follows closely in her wake, with a com- 
plete story, illustrated, and Boudoir Gossip 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 231 

about Prince George of Wales, and Mrs. 
Mackay, and the Earl and Countess of Jersey. 
« Bow Bells " and " The Wide World Novel- 
ettes " are on a distinctly lower scale : the fic- 
tion more sensational, the cuts coarser, and the 
pink cover of " Bow Bells " flaunting and vul- 
gar. " A Magazine of Short Stories " aims at 
being lively and vivacious in the style of Rhoda 
Broughton, and gives a good pennyworth of 
tales, verses, Answers to Correspondents, and 
a column of Familiar Quotations Verified that 
alone is worth the money. But the final 
triumph of quantity over quality, of matter 
over mind, is in the " Book for All," published 
weekly at the price of one penny, and contain- 
ing five separate departments, for women, girls, 
men, boys, and children. Each of these depart- 
ments has a short illustrated story, poetry, 
anecdotes, puzzles, confidential talks with the 
editor, advice on every subject, and informa- 
tion of every description. Here you can learn 
"how to preserve your beauty" and how to 
make " royal Battenberg" lace, how to run a 
Texas ranch and how to go into mourning for 
your mother, how to cure stammering and how 
to rid a dog of fleas. Here you may acquire 



232 POINTS OF VIEW. 

knowledge upon the most varied topics, from 
lung diseases in animals to Catherine of Rus- 
sia's watch, from the aborigines of Australia 
to scientific notes on the Lithuanian language. 
The Unknown Public must indeed be athirst 
for knowledge, if it can absorb such quantities 
week after week with unabated zeal ; and, 
from the Answers to Correspondents, we are 
led to suppose it is ever eager for more. One 
inquiring mind is comforted by the assurance 
that " narrative monophone will appear in its 
turn," and an ambitious but elderly reader is 
gently warned that " a person aged fifty might 
learn to play on the guitar, and perhaps be 
able to sing ; but the chances are that, in both 
instances, the performance will not be likely 
to captivate those who are compelled to listen 
to it." On the whole, after an exhaustive 
study of penny weeklies, I should say that, 
were I expected to provide a large family with 
reading matter and encyclopaedic information 
at the modest rate of one dollar and four 
cents a year, the " Book for All " would be 
the journal of my choice. 

It is not in penny fiction alone, however, 
that the railway book-stalls do a thriving trade. 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 233 

The shilling novels stand in goodly rows, in- 
viting you to a purchase you are sure after- 
wards to regret. The average shilling novel 
in England differs from the average penny 
novel in size only ; and, judged by measure- 
ment, the sole standard it is possible to apply, 
it should, to warrant its price, be about six 
times the length. " Lord Elwyn's Daughter " 
and " The Nun's Curse," at a shilling each, 
bear such a strong family resemblance to their 
penny cousins, " Golden Chains " and " Her 
Bitter Burden," that it needs their outward 
dress to distinguish them ; and " Haunted " 
and " The Man who Vanished " carry their fin- 
est thrills in their title. Quite early in my 
search, I noticed at the Waterloo station three 
shilling novels, — " Weaker than Woman," 
" Lady Hutton's Ward," and " Diana's Dis- 
cipline," all advertised conspicuously as being 
by the author of " Dora Thorne." Feeling 
that my ignorance of Dora Thorne herself 
was a matter for regret and enlightenment, I 
asked' for her at once, to be told she was not 
in stock, but I might, if I liked, have " Lady 
Gwendolen's Dream," by the same writer. I 
declined " Lady Gwendolen," and at the next 



234 POINTS OF VIEW. 

station once more demanded " Dora Thorne." 
In vain ! The young man in attendance glanced 
over his volumes, shook his head, and offered 
me " Diana's Discipline," and a fresh, book 
" The Fatal Lilies," also by the author of 
" Dora Thorne." Another stall at another 
station had all five of these novels, and a sixth 
one in addition, " A Golden Heart," by the 
author of "Dora Thorne," but still no "Dora." 
Elsewhere I encountered " Her Martyrdom " 
and " Which Loved Him Best," both stamped 
with the cabalistic words " By the Author of 
1 Dora Thorne ' ; " and so it continued to the 
end. New stories without number, all from 
the same pen, and all countersigned " By the 
Author of ' Dora Thorne,' " but never "Dora." 
From first to last, she remained elusive, invisi- 
ble, unattainable, — a Mrs. Harris among 
books, a name and nothing more. 

Comedy is very popular at railway book- 
stalls : " My Churchwardens," by a Vicar, and 
"My Rectors," by a Quondam Curate; a 
weekly pennyworth of mild jokes called " Pick- 
Me-Up," and a still cheaper and still milder 
collection for a half -penny called " Funny 
Cuts ; " an occasional shabby copy of " Inno- 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 235 

cents Abroad," which stands as the representa- 
tive of American humor, and that most mysteri- 
ous of journals, " Ally Sloper's Half Holiday," 
which always conveys the impression of being 
exceedingly amusing if one could only under- 
stand the fun. Everybody — I mean, of 
course, everybody who rides in third-class car- 
riages — buys this paper, and studies it so- 
berly, industriously, almost sadly ; but I have 
never yet seen anybody laugh over it. Mrs. 
Pennell, indeed, with a most heroic devotion 
to the cause of humor, and a catholic apprecia- 
tion of its highways and byways, has analyzed 
Ally Sloper for the benefit of the Known 
Public which reads the "Contemporary Re- 
view," and claims that he is a modern brother 
of old-time jesters, — of Pierrot, and Pulci- 
nello, and Pantaleone ; reflecting national 
vices and follies with caustic but good-natured 
fidelity. " While the cultured of the present 
generation have been busy proving their pow- 
ers of imitation," says Mrs. Pennell, "this 
unconscious evolution of a popular type has 
established the pretensions of the people to 
originality." But, alas ! it is not given to the 
moderately cultivated to understand such types 



236 POINTS OF VIEW. 

without a good deal of interpretation; and 
merely buying and reading the paper are of 
very little service. Here are the pictures, 
which I am told are clever ; here is the text, 
which is probably clever, too ; but their com- 
bined brilliancy conveys no light to my mind. 
Ally Sloper leading " a local German band " at 
Tenby, Ally Sloper interviewing distinguished 
people, may, like Mr. F.'s aunt, be " ingenious 
and even subtle," but the key to his subtlety 
is lacking. As for Tootsie, and The Dook 
Snook, and Lord Bob, and The Hon. Billy, and 
all the other members of this interesting fam- 
ily who play their weekly part in the recurring 
comedy, they would be quite as amusing to the 
uninitiated reader if they followed the example 
of the erudite Oxonian, and conversed in " the 
Ostiak dialect of Tungusian." 

By way of contrast, I suppose, the other 
comic weeklies preserve a simplicity of charac- 
ter which is equaled only by their placid and 
soothing dullness. It is easy to understand 
the amount of humor conveyed in such jests 
as these, both of which are deemed worthy of 
half -page illustrations. 

" Aunt Kate (in the park). Tell me, Ethel, 
when any of the men look at me. 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 237 

" Little Ethel. It 's me they look at, aunty. 
You 're too old." 

" Dear friends again. Madge (rather eld- 
erly). What do you think of my new hat, 
Lily? 

" Lily. It 's rather old-fashioned, dear, but 
it splits you." 

This is the very meekest of funning, and 
feminine tartness and juvenile precocity must 
be at a low ebb with the Unknown Public when 
it can relish such shadowy thrusts, even at in- 
creasing years, which, from the days of the 
prophet to the days of Mr. Gladstone, have 
ever been esteemed a fitting subject for mirth. 
The distance between the penny dreadful and 
" Lorna Doone " is not vaster than the dis- 
tance between these hopeless jests and the fine 
cynicism, the arrowy humor, of Du Maurier. 
Mrs. Pennell says very truely that Cimabue 
Brown and Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns would 
have no meaning whatever for the British 
workman, — would probably be as great a mys- 
tery to him as The Dook Snook and The Hon. 
Billy are to me. But Punch's dear little lad 
who, on a holiday afternoon, has caught only 
one fish, " and that was so young it did n't 



238 POINTS OF VIEW. 

know how to hold on," and the charitable but 
near-sighted old lady who drops a penny into 
the hat of a meditative peer, come within the 
scope of everybody's comprehension. If more 
energy is to be exerted " in bringing home to 
the people the inherent attractions of Shake- 
speare, Scott, Marryat, Dickens, Lytton, and 
George Eliot," according to the comprehensive 
programme laid out by Mr. Salmon, why not, 
as a first step, bring home to them the attrac- 
tions of a bright, clean, merry jest ? It might 
enable them, perhaps, to recognize the gap 
between the humor of George Eliot and the 
humor of Captain Marryat, and would serve 
to prick their dormant critical faculties into 
life. 

The one sad sight at an English railway 
book-stall is the little array of solid writers 
who stand neglected, shabby, and apart, plead- 
ing dumbly out of their dusty shame for rec- 
ognition and release. I have seen Baxter's 
46 Saint's Rest " jostled contemptuously into a 
corner. I have seen " The Apostolic Fathers " 
hanging their hoary heads with dignified hu- 
mility, and " The Popes of Rome " lingering 
in inglorious bondage. I have seen our own 



ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 239 

Emerson broken -backed and spiritless; and, 
harder still, " The Autocrat of the Breakfast- 
Table " shorn of his gay supremacy, frayed, 
and worn, and exiled from his friends. I have 
seen " Sartor Resartus " skulking on a dark 
shelf with a yellow -covered neighbor more 
gaudy than respectable, and I have seen 
Buckle's boasted ''Civilization" in a condition 
that would have disgraced a savage. These 
Titans, discrowned and discredited, these cap- 
tives, honorable in their rags, stirred my heart 
with sympathy and compassion. I wanted to 
gather them up and carry them away to re- 
spectability, and the long-forgotten shelter of 
library walls. But light-weight luggage pre- 
cluded philanthropy, and, steeling my reluc- 
tant soul, I left them to their fate. Still they 
stand, I know, unsought, neglected, scorned, 
while thousands of " Dorothys " and " Ally 
Slopers " are daily sold around them. " How 
had the star of this daughter of Gomer waxed, 
while the star of these Cymry, his sons, had 
waned!" How shall genius be revered and 
honored, when buried without decent rites in 
the bleak graveyard of a railway book-stall ? 






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